From what I can remember, May 18, 2016 was a hard day for my family. When I think about that date, vivid thoughts of despair come to mind. It was the date for my great grandfather’s funeral. It was all a shock, a very sudden death that affected everyone. This would be a different kind of experience because I have never been to an actual funeral before this.

My great grandfather was married to my great grandmother for over sixty-five years, they met when they were almost in their twenties and have been in love ever since. Louis Arjay Cleveland married Ida Mae Monk on July 9, 1949.  He was a part of the Freemasons but was also a carpenter and a pipe fitter, while she was a lunch lady at the neighboring school. They accomplished so much together, but he was most proud of the house he built for the two and their six children. They lived a happy life together with their six children.  No one could imagine that their relationship would end the way it did.

About a year before his passing, he went to Jefferson Hospital, where his daughter Cheryl worked. He was admitted to the hospital with fluid in his lungs and he could never catch his breath but the doctors did some tests to find out what had happened. He was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Everyone knew about it, except Ida. We could not tell her because we knew that she would just go nuts and lose it. It is just one big secret that she still does not know about today.

Personally, I wish I was closer to him. I only saw once a month if that. I regret not taking time to go see them because they were such great people.

As we walked into the funeral home on the morning of his viewing, the feeling in the air was calm and welcoming. You would think that you would be overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness and be overcome by all the memories of him, but somehow this was not the case.

When you walk into the reserved room, you are invited into a colorful, celebration of life. There were strict rules about how you could not dress in black as this to be seen as a celebration of all the things he had accomplished, not as a loss of a soul.

My great grandmother, Ida Cleveland, felt so overwhelmed with emotion when she went up to his casket the moment before they were about to take it out to the hearse. She went up to him to say her last good bye and she fell onto him screaming at the top of her lungs, “I was supposed to go first! He wasn’t supposed to leave me!”

This set off the whole funeral home. Everyone burst into tears, after just recovering from it all. She could barely walk back to her chair. It just took over the whole place, it was now filled with sorrow once again.

My grandmother tried to calm down her mother by saying, “Mom, he’s just building you a house in the clouds,” as a way to calm her down.

There was an anonymous agreement that this is the reason why he had to leave her. He left her so soon because he needs time to build her the dream house she has always wanted. It was a cute way for her to realize why he left her so soon.

After the funeral, we all made our way to the cemetery to bid farewell for the final time. It was a celebration around his final resting place. He was buried on a hill overlooking the city where his house was, so he would constantly be watching Ida everyday. Ida lost it again. She freaked out that she was not supposed to watch him die, that she should be the one in the coffin.

This whole experience has changed the way I look at relationships. Their relationship was not perfect, but they worked really hard at it and that is why it hurt so bad. They had their share of problems but they found a way to work it out and they were together for almost their whole lives. It was a fairy tale that everyone could look to as an example of a relationship that was not necessarily perfect, but it ended up working out for the better. This could be a reason why I value relationships so much. They were each other's first relationship and it was just a beautiful fairy tale that they lived together. I hope that I could find a relationship that has this much love in it, as their’s did.