Wednesday, October 30, 2019 // The Statement
6B
M
y grandfather was born on June 6, 1927. He
was in the Navy during World War II and he
served on a submarine and was stranded for
weeks with only coconuts for sustenance. We celebrated
his 92nd birthday early this summer, and he remarked, for
the second year in a row, how much this celebration meant
to him and how he couldn’t wait to eat lemon cake again
with us the next time around. He wanted to live to 100 and
well past that.
I am lucky to have lived close to my family while grow-
ing up. We scattered ourselves around a little lake in south-
ern Michigan, where my dad was raised. My little sister
and I would run around the neighborhood during the sum-
mer playing spy games, building forts, collecting plants and
rocks. We would ding-dong ditch neighbors and run into
the woods, make trails along the lakefront and commit our
fair share of trespassing over soggy lawns and piers.
My grandparents had a beautiful garden with wild
raspberries and strawberries that we would sneakily har-
vest and bring home. The past few summers, we spent
hours picking wild blackberries from their prickly bushes,
avoiding mosquitoes and spider webs before stopping by
our grandfather’s house to share. My grandmother used
to layer up in the heat of July with socks pulled over long
jeans and sweatshirts tucked into waistbands to evade
thorns and biting mites, but more importantly, to reach the
back of the berry bushes and avoid letting a single berry go
to waste. Their garden—now overgrown with grasses and
dandelions—no longer produces the delicate fruit it once
did.
As summers passed and high school drew to a close,
family members were increasingly curious as to where I
planned to continue my education. Not many people in
my family, aside from my older cousins, attended college,
and their expectations for me were high. I had college
applications over halfway done for all sorts of out-of-state
schools in October and I planned on having an additional
two weeks to complete them with proper edits and teacher
revisions.
I received a concussion that day and was diagnosed with
Post Concussive Syndrome after a month or two of symp-
toms not letting up. I was recommended for medical leave
and was placed under a Section 504 plan which allowed me
to be a part-time high school student and miss a significant
number of school days. This arrangement allowed me to
still graduate with my class.
My grandfather wanted to check in and see how I was
doing. We connected quickly over our shared head knocks;
he had fallen his fair share of times with old age. We dis-
cussed mutual symptoms and how these injuries made
us feel different, even if we didn’t look different. We talk-
ed about how I didn’t know if I would get into any of the
schools I applied to because I wasn’t able to finish my col-
lege applications. He promised me I would be fine, and I
ended up only submitting to in-state schools.
Once I got into Michigan, it was hard for me to talk to
him as his hearing had started to decline. His stubborn-
ness demanded I shout to convey a message. So, I reverted
to writing him letters and sitting with him while he read
them and smiled back up at me. I wrote to him about my
new research position, my volunteering at the hospital, the
classes I was taking and how much I loved it here at Michi-
gan. He was so enthused when he found out I wanted to be
a doctor — it’d be the first in our family and he immediately
began calling me Dr. Bowman when I visited. He liked the
ring of it and how much responsibility it carried. I could
never express enough how his his nearly one hundred years
of hard work granted me the opportunity to be in the posi-
tion I am and be a student at the University of Michigan.
Between bonding over mutual head traumas, intently
listening to classic American stories from decades prior or
shouting “I love you” from three feet away because he was
too stubborn to use his hearing aids, my grandfather made
everything possible and achievable for my family. Especial-
ly as a first-generation college student, the feat of attend-
ing a prestigious school is rarely possible without the hard
work and sacrifice of respected family members that work
to instill in you a drive for integrity and success.
I recently got accepted for a position at The Michigan
Daily as a columnist and he was so thrilled to read the Uni-
versity’s newspaper and see our last name printed in it. For
fall break, I brought home four copies of each paper I was
in so far this school year to show him. But on the morning
of Oct. 14, my grandfather passed, and I wasn’t able to show
him in person. This date was once so important for me as it
marked a change in my life post-concussion. Now it signi-
fies another major change and life without my grandfather.
This date now holds intrinsic importance and sadness for
me in so many interwoven and complex ways, and I know I
will be unraveling it for a long time.
The path that grandparents pave for us
BY BRITTANY BOWMAN, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
PHOTO COURTESY OF BRITTNAY BOWMAN