"Enjoy the little moments " by Saphire S

It's a funny saying. We hear as kids from adults or from our parents but we never grasp the true meaning of it. I was raised by my grandmother from the age of 6-16. She’s my second mom. She took me to school, provided all the needs I had as a kid, and played the best music.  She would always tell me to enjoy the little moments. That being either hanging out with my parents who were only around for a little while or getting to see my family that lived abroad. She always would tell me when I complained that I didn't have enough time with that person or place to enjoy the little moments that I had and not to focus on the negative. I never really liked when she told me that honestly, I felt like it was just a grandmotherly saying but then life happened and I truly understood the meaning of that saying when my grandmother got cancer. I was 14 when we first discovered that she had some type of cancer in her uterus. I remember feeling so sad and so broken because this was my second mom that I felt like I was losing. I told myself to keep calm for my grandma but it destroyed me. Cancer is no joke and it can make you feel so hopeless because there's honestly no cure and no way to get rid of it completely and when you see it affecting a loved one it breaks you apart. But every single time that I would be with my grandmother she would always tell me to enjoy the little moments we have. She saw that I was so negative and that I would lose sight of the little moments that we had where she didn't have any pain that day, or felt stronger. I believe that sometimes we can see a situation and only point out the bad. Sometimes we lose sight of the good that we experience even if its just for a moment. When things feel so hard or when you feel hopeless we tend to solely focus on that instead of enjoying the little moments along the way. To go through her chemotherapy runs  and sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the news on her pet scan result, feeling the anxiety of what's to come. My grandma would make funny jokes, bring up past embarrassing memories of me as a kid, or playing loud music that we used to listen to at every family party. She told me that every single time she did this she wanted me to enjoy this moment of happiness together. She would remind me that these are the little moments we want to hang on to in hard times. I believe throughout my grandmother's situation with cancer I learned that enjoying the little moments is more important than focusing on the negative. Now I can look back and remember all of our little moments we had together from sitting in the doctor's office listening to loud music and praying to God that we would recieve a good report, dancing before going into the chemo runs, singing on the top of our lungs to chilean music while the tears fell from our eyes. Those are the little moments that I cherish with my grandmother and can never forget. I believe once I learned to focus on the little moments I realized that through all her situations we made the best of it. I realized that by enjoying the good moments helps me but also my grandmother. Thankfully she fought cancer like a champ and now she still is a stage four cancer patient but is in remission! Recently she told me that if we didn't have those little moments of laughing, singing , dancing, living in the moment that maybe she wouldn't have had so much drive to push through the. but because we had those moments together it gave her a little bit of fight which taught me that enjoying those little moments can go a long way. I believe this helped in a lot of ways. In life we face hardships and challenges that we paint as negative and we focus on only the bad things when what should focus on is the good things along the way. So when you have a a hard situation remember to focus on the good and enjoy those special moments. This helped me in a hard time in my life and now I go through life enjoying the little things which helps me better mentally