In life, many things are taken for granted on a customary basis. For example, we wake up in the morning and routinely expect to see and hear from certain people. Most people live daily life with the unsighted notion that every important individual in their lives at the moment, will exist there tomorrow. However, in actuality, such is not the case. I too fell victim to the routine familiarity of expectation, until the day reality taught me otherwise. Growing up, I always found sanctuary confiding in my father’s youngest brother, Alberto; I had a favorite uncle, as we all seem to have at one point in our lives. Since Uncle Alberto was the youngest, I looked at him as the coolest out of the myriad of older relatives. He often bought me ice cream sundaes and showered me with aimless jokes and “piggy-back” rides. Most of the time spent visiting my father on weekends, was actually spent wrestling with Uncle Alberto or playing video games until the break of daylight. I looked forward weekends, because that meant “Uncle Dean Time”. I expected to hang out with my Uncle Dean every Friday and Saturday. In fact, I knew for certain he would be waiting at my father’s home with some brand new clothes or any other prize vied for by a 10 year old. Little did I know that over the next couple of years, I would gain knowledge of one of the most important lessons of life: value those dearest to you, for you never know how long they will be in your company. When 12 years old came around, nothing could’ve primed me for the amount of devastation that was to submerge my happy little world. Two months after my birthday, I received word that my renowned and dearly loved, Uncle Dean, had been killed in an unfortunate automobile accident. Crushed, yet filled with a strange numbness, I became withdrawn and dwindled in disbelief. “How could this be?” I would repeat those words of this question over and over to myself, as if it were some magical mantra that could resurrect my deceased best ally. I began taking in the gravity of what this all meant: no more “piggy-back” rides, no more wrestling matches, no more late-night video game contests, ultimately no more fun with Uncle Dean, ever. I never got a opportunity to say good-bye. It took some time for me to get over the loss of my Uncle Dean. Years later I would still await his face when the weekend came, only to be slapped by the realism of his passing, and force-fed my own salty tears.
Years later, I began to look at life in a whole different facet. I made it a point to let people know just how vital they are to me, whether they were friends or family. The point is, you never know when something could happen that would transform your life, or the lives of those around you, in a devastating way. Instead of taking the people in our lives for granted, we should embrace them everyday and let them know just how much they mean to us.