Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry Read Online Free PDF Page B

waking up the whole house, so I used my phone to Google Ghostology and hoped for the best.
    Apparently, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne made up the word in a book called Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life . After he invented it, nobody much used it, until in the last few years, when it got related to ghostlore , or the scientific study of ghosts and the supernatural.
    Just thinking about ghosts made my heart beat a little too fast, and I had to spend a few seconds shining my phone allaround my dark room, chasing away all the shadows.
    â€œGhostology,” I whispered to keep the silence away from me. Why would Grandma write about ghosts? She didn’t really like fiction books all that much, and she always teased me for reading so much about creepy things and other planets and magic.
    I turned the phone’s light back to the page I had pulled out of the envelope. It looked like the beginning of a manuscript. With a sigh, feeling something between surrender and guilt, I pulled out the second page.
    The text wasn’t dense. It looked more like a poem than a story. As I read it, my eyes opened a little wider.
    For My Granddaughter
    I couldn’t find my car at the shopping center, and I walked around for an hour, looking for it and getting madder and madder - and scared, too.
    That’s how it starts, Oops.
    You don’t think much about it that first time, even if you’ve never had a problem finding your car in a parking lot before.
    You don’t worry when you lose your wallet, or you can’t put your hands on the keys you know you left on the table, or when you call a friend by somebody else’s name.
    Then it gets worse.
    Then it gets more.
    Then you know.
    And then you’re gone.
    - Ruth Beans
    At the very bottom of the page, I found a date. It was the year my grandmother found out she had Alzheimer’s disease, before she ever moved in with us. I didn’t think twice before pulling out the next page. In the eerie light of the phone, I read the first page of the thick letter she left for me.
    So, my little Oops, it’s like this.
    Today, after a bunch of tests, my doctor told me and your father that I haveAlzheimer’s disease. There’s nothing they can do for it. It’ll take me in bits and pieces, until I’m no more than a ghost of myself, like in those science fiction and fantasy stories you’re always reading. I don’t know what to say to my boy, because when my doctor explained it to us, Marcus cried. You’re too young to understand right now, but your father realizes that before I die, you’ll all learn the details of Alzheimer’s disease, Oops. He understands that you’ll know my face, and my eyes, and my arms and my hands, and my fingers and my toes. You just won’t know me, and I won’t know you.
    So, I want to leave a little bit of myself for you to find. I want you to know me, Oops. The real me, not that ghost you’ll come to call Grandma, and the subjects that are most important to me - our history, and the parts of it that are being forgotten like the United States itself has gotten Alzheimer’s.That’s why I sat down to write this, so you’ll have it, so you can share what you think should be shared with your parents and your friends, even with the world if that’s what you decide. But it’s harder than I thought it would be.
    If you could write about yourself and tell your favorite person who you are, what would you say? You should try that sometime, because I have as many pages as I can stay myself to write—and it seems like way too much and not enough, all at the same time.
    For now, I’ll just tell you I’m scared.
    I’m going to forget everything, but maybe if I get some of myself on paper, you won’t forget me, or how much I love you.
    Bear with me, Oops. I don’t want to be just a ghost to you, so I’m going to do the best I can.
    Tears made the words look funny,