"Lavinu, Grandad"

(For the story behind this poem, please read the summary above, if you haven't done so already.)

Mere words fail to say

All the emotion my heart wishes to portray

Anger, hurt, and intense sadness

These emotions I just can’t express

When I heard the news, I fell apart

It felt as though a knife had attacked my heart

The words nobody wants to hear

Fell upon my devastated ears

I couldn’t believe it; it couldn’t be true

Without my grandad, what would I do?

Wasn’t there a way to bring him back?

Just for five minutes, that’s all I ask

Just for the chance to say goodbye

To share a joke, and not have to cry

To hold him close and breathe in his smell

To kiss him once more, and bid him farewell

But above all things, what I wouldn’t give

If just for five more minutes he was allowed to live

There isn’t one thing I wouldn’t do

To hear him just say, “Lavinu!”

Our own little way of saying, “Loving you”

At the same time, we’d say it right on cue

You may think that it sounds cheesy

But it means so much because he picked it up so easily

It was the last word we said to eachother

Now I struggle to say it to another

The phrase will always remind me of him

And the funny way he’d say it with a pleasant grin

It’s been a week, yet it feels like years

I wonder if I’ll run out of tears

He was the loveliest man there ever could be

He will always be so precious to me

A/N: As the poem explains, "lavinu" (pronounced lah-vin-ooh) is my grandad's and my way of saying "loving you". We always said it to eachother, every time we saw eachother, without fail, followed by a kiss and a cuddle. The last time I saw him was 2 days before he died. He had his foot in pot and was upstairs in his bed,and I was about to leave the house, when I paused and ran back upstairs. I gave him a kiss and said goodbye, then we swapped a smile and said, "Lavinu!" I'm just happy knowing that the last word we shared was that one, because it meant so much between us.