Two days before I left home to go to college I got in a fight with my dad. Over the summer I didn’t prioritize my time properly and procrastinated on packing until the last few days. My dad questioned why I didn’t think enough about the family and try to make the most those last few days. We went back and forth for hours debating whether or not I had really spent enough time with my family until my dad finally stopped the fight and told me to come with him downstairs.

We dug through several files when he finally pulled out the first brief base he had ever bought when he started working. I already knew that in it encased our family’s most important documents from passports to the family tree. In that briefcase also contained a yellow folder with three pages printed from a Word document.

I’d seen the briefcase before, but never the document. On it told the story my father had heard the night before his grandfather and my great grandfather had passed away. It was so loosely written as my father had quickly jotted down bullets of details from the sorrowful account told that night.

My great grandfather was a very smart man, but he had lived a life full of regret.

The story started off after my great grandfather had met my great grand mother. However, at the time they were living in two seperte countries. Due to the separation, this is when he met his second wife. The second wife turned out to be my great grandmother’s cousin who used too come over to her house just to seduce my great grand father.

Even during this, my great grandfather tried and did accomplish immigrating my great grand mother to the US. This caused the second wife to begin fighting my with great grandfather. As he traveled around the world to do business this cause the second wife to further cause more drama.

Many years later the second wife had given money to her son when he met a girl so that he may take over her family’s bar. This had infuriated my great grandfather as he knew that it would start trouble. The son ended up marrying the girl, only to divorce her later. The son then met another girl and gave birth to twins he did not to raise because his mother looked down on her family background. So, he came to the US and married another girl and had additional children.

My great grandfather was devasted and wanted the son to take responsibility for his children, but the son refused. He wanted a divorce from his second wife, the root causes were due to the resistance he met from the second wife when he moved my great grandmother from China and the son buying the bar which ended up ruining him.

My father told me that although my great grandfather made a lot of errors in his life, he kept his soul and integrity. He didn’t know how to fix his mistakes or talk about how badly he had felt, but he did try to reach out and claify what had happened. My father believes he is a very intelligent and intuitive man filled with a tremendous amount of compassion. He passed away on Thanks giving to remind everyone that it is essential we always appreciate what we have.

Fame and fortune, you can have it all and easily lose it if you don’t understand the essential and most important details to life. Also, it is important to always keep your family close because they are what matters most in life. Friends come and go, but your blood will stick by you forever. It is important to cherish everything you have to its full capacity or it could be gone in an instant.