I’ve been writing the section about when we heard about my grandfather’s death. I was in a writing zone, so I was furiously typing, both from my memory of the events and the memories of my family members that I interviewed. I tried to stay locked in, to keep typing, to keep putting text on the screen and get the thoughts out of my head and onto the screen. But I couldn’t. Years later, recalling all of it, I found myself emotional.

Sitting in a Starbucks in New York City isn’t the best place to be re-confronted with awful memories. I can vividly remember holding my mom as she screamed. I will never, ever forget it. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my brief life. I will never know how this truly affected my mother, and the rest of my family, but I know how it affected me.

I know, because I felt all those things all over again. So much so, I had to stop writing it and come write this. I needed to put my feelings down instead of relaying others. Yes, I’m very much part of the story I’m telling and I’m trying to divorce myself from it, ever so slightly, to get the real scope of what happened into text without interjecting my feelings, but it’s difficult.

In this day of Facebook statuses, tweets, photos and video sharing sites, it’s easy for me to share my feelings on anything, at anytime. But recalling old memories… There’s no social network for that. As an over-sharer, it’s weird to have to keep something bottled up, so I put it here.

It’s why I think this story was so important and needed to be told.

It’s easy for all of us in the family to keep things bottled up, but it’s better — I think — to get everything out, even if it does mean reliving some awful memories. We have to sift through those to get to the important stuff… the happy stuff… the good memories. Those are the ones we need to cherish, not the ones when Grandpa was ripped from our lives.

We need to re-live it now, so we never have to re-live it again. So we did.