Daily Prompt – December 18, 2025

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

The first person I think of when I read this prompt is my maternal grandfather. He was a quiet man, gentle. He was intelligent and loving. He was also frustratingly stubborn. I myself in him as I get older.

He passed away the day before my 23rd birthday and was buried the day after it. He didn’t even make it to my first wedding. It was my childhood that he impacted the most but his presence still lingers now. I am odd about sentimentality and family. I don’t have pictures up of my parents or most family. Yet there are 2 pictures of my maternal grandparents that are always on display and when I moved to florida and was staying in an AirBNB for a month before we moved into our first rental, I had them there too instead packed away.

My grandfather has always been one of my guardian angels, sitting on my shoulder guiding me. I don’t know if he would be proud of everything I have done in my life but I do believe he would be proud of me. I think it would delight him to see his fountain pens that are older than me be used and lovingly cared for. I think he would be excited by the work I do as he was an attorney that focused in an area not too different from the quality assurance and regulatory compliance work that I do.

He taught me how to play blackjack at their kitchen table with my grandmothers pennies and he made me the best grilled cheese sandwich’s and tomato soup. He picked me up from school every Friday through 6th grade because there was no after school program on Fridays. He set me up for financial success. Not just with the various accounts and funds, but making sure I knew how finances worked. My mother helped with that too.

He was a caretaker. Sometimes too much of one. He took such good care of my grandmother that she was quite honestly helpless when he passed and my mother had to take over. I learned a lot from that too. I am a caretaker, but I approach it differently. I aim to teach my loved ones how rather than do it for them. Still, I care as quietly and as deeply as he did.

I know some would say he was a hard man. He had his ways. He was stubborn and emotionally he could be hard to read. Except with me it seemed. I seemed to bring a light out in him, that none other did, not even his only child my mother.

I wonder if we were more alike than anyone realized. Living silently with different brains that were unrecognizable for our times. Him born in 1921 when autism wasn’t even a thing and me a female born in the late 70s when autism wasn’t female thing. I can’t say that he was. I can say it’s genetic and that I see many of my traits in him and it would explain so so much.

Regardless, Pop, if you can see this from where you are, I love you and I miss you.