Personal Narrative: An Interview With My Grandfather

The first person I chose to interview was my paternal grandfather. I felt that my grandfather had an interesting insight and perspective on death due to his age and culture. Typically in the Hindu faith, the eldest son takes care of the grandparents up until death which I have witness first hand. Other cultural expectations led my grandfather through intriguing and difficult experiences with death. His first experience of death was a rather drastic lost in his nuclear family. His father was a doctor caring for Tuberculosis patients when he contracted the diseases himself and passed away when my grandfather was nine months old. Although the loss of a caregiver is quite drastic, he remembers very little and stated the loss as a fact without …show more content…
In addition, I believe that this uncomfortableness also stems from the lack of conversation about death he experienced when he was younger. He stated that his maternal grandfather told him that no amount of crying would bring the dead back and that one should take care of the survivors. I found it interesting that even in different cultures, adults feel uncomfortable and don 't take the time to explain the death process or what death entitles. However, his grandfather did mention the irreversibility of death which I found interesting due to the Hindu belief in reincarnation. It wasn 't until age 10 that he truly grasped the entire notion of death became frequent. His maternal grandfather passed away from old age and he saw the ritual bath and funeral procession. In addition, a typhoid epidemic had struck their village killing his uncle’s wife, two of his teachers, and multiple teachers’ sons. The frequent exposure of death became routine with constant media coverage of World War II and the deaths that followed. The bombardment of death taught him his own personal way to grieve which is to cry for a little and then to give solace to people who are affected by the