This has been a strange week.

It marks ten years since my paternal grandmother passed away, and I’ve found myself thinking a lot about that time—and how strangely difficult it still is to remember it clearly.

My grandmother’s passing remains one of the strangest, most unsettling, and most difficult periods of my life. And I honestly cannot believe that a decade has already passed.

Even now, it’s very surreal for me (and for my entire family). I still find myself forgetting which day certain things happened, or even the sequence in which they happened. It’s as though those two weeks exist somewhere outside of the normal timeline.

Every once in a while, I’ll remember that she’s gone, and it still hits me with that same gut-punch. It’s lessened over the years,  but every now and then, completely unexpectedly, grief comes rushing back and reminds me that there are some absences you never quite get used to.

Grief is strange like that.

Which is one of the reasons I’ve thrown myself into nostalgia this week.

It’s one of the ways I cope. Like maybe, somehow reaching backward and finding the things that made me happy helps me remember the moments I had with someone I loved very much. Someone who took care of me. Someone who protected me.

So this week I made a point to revisit one of her favorite films, Lady on a Train. Written by  Leslie Charteris (As both a flim and a novel) the 1945 comedy/noir starred one of Hollywood’s blonde bombshells, Deanna Durbin and David Bruce. It was on Turner classic Movies one day while I stayed home sick from school so we watched it (along with So I Married a Witch) and she revealed that one of those two films was her first date with my grandfather. 

I’ve also been revisiting Jem and the Holograms, Irwin Allen’s Alice in Wonderland, and my favorite Thai drama Until We Meet Again. Two of the three of these I loved as a child. The other,  I discovered much later but somehow became connected to that same feeling of comfort, wonder, and possibility.

I guess that’s what nostalgia really is for me.

It isn’t about pretending the past was perfect. It’s about remembering the parts of it that gave me joy—and allowing those pieces to remind me that even during the hardest chapters, there was still beauty, creativity, music, laughter, and imagination.

Ten years later, I still miss my grandmother.

I still grieve.

But I’m also still here, still creating, still finding things that make me happy, and still carrying pieces of the past with me as I move into whatever chapter is written next.

Tears, laughter, music… Life goes on… 

There will be more s