Last Sunday, my family celebrated what was likely my grandpa’s last birthday. Being the eldest grandchild, I was in charge of securing his birthday cake. The Mina of birthdays past would have run to Sam’s Club and ordered something from a catalog, but current Mina knows something that those Minas didn’t. My grandpa is dying.

When I was a little girl, my favorite place in the world was atop my grandpa’s shoulders. My hometown didn’t have much to offer, but I felt like a seasoned adventurer when he’d take me to the local nature park and hoist me onto his shoulders so I could see the captive birds of prey. There’s a very real chance this newsletter wouldn’t exist without him: he instilled a love of learning in me early, paying me to write book reports over the summer and reading me encyclopedias when I was a preschooler. He always talked to me like a grown-up and took me seriously, which made me feel like the most important person in the world.

Then adolescence happened, and the magic and mystique surrounding my grandpa seemed to disappear overnight. The questions that made me feel important when I was in elementary school seemed like an annoying waste of time in high school. Trips to the nature park became burdens instead of adventures. I went from begging my mom to let me stay over at his apartment to dodging his phone calls. Like many teens, I became an expert at breaking my grandpa’s heart. My younger siblings followed suit.

Fast forward to August 2025, the month before my thirtieth birthday, and my mom got a call from my grandpa asking her to accompany him to a “routine check-up.” Hours later, she revealed that he has a slew of chronic illnesses — all terminal. According to his physician, he’d known about these diagnoses since 2019. I guess he just needed time to process.

Sometimes, as I drive him to his latest doctor’s appointment, I can’t help but wish that I could go back and answer the countless phone calls that I sent to voicemail. Occasionally, I get mad at him for keeping the diagnoses to himself for so long. But the truth is, he never stopped reaching out. He never stopped caring. My anger is nothing more than thinly veiled guilt and disgust with myself. What kind of granddaughter needs the threat of imminent death to force her to spend more time with her grandpa?

While my instinct is to browbeat myself over past mistakes, the truth is that this is no time for shoulda, woulda, couldas. Sometimes, teenagers are assholes who are mean to their grandparents. It is what it is. I can’t go back and force 19-year-old Mina to answer her grandpa’s phone calls. But I can take him out to lunch as 30-year-old Mina. I can give him a ride to his doctor’s appointments. I can bake him a carrot cake for his birthday.

Re-meeting your grandparents as adults on equal standing is kinda funny. Learning about who they are outside the role of grandparent — their sense of humor, their mistakes, their goals, their regrets — is a humanizing experience. My grandpa is kind of an asshole and a bit of an elitist (he just like me fr). He’s a little pompous and very obstinate. He’s also funny as fuck.

While I hate that it took a cluster of terminal diagnoses to restore my relationship with my grandpa, I’m glad he clued us in before it was too late. Finding out you don’t have much time left has to be harrowing; sharing that with your loved ones has to be even scarier. But, he did the scary thing, and we’re all closer for it.

There’s no blueprint for how to live with someone who’s dying without making things awkward or depressing. Ignoring the diagnosis doesn’t help the situation, but neither does fixation. I don’t have the answers. No one does. All I can suggest is this: when in doubt…bake them a carrot cake.