When you pass away, you’re often survived by those you share a surname with. It was my mom who survived my grandfather, only through her I knew of him. Emeterio Jr. was an enigma who worked as an announcer in bingo gambling fairs, and the eldest of the eight children—the only one who never left the 80s. He’d already passed in 1986, while I was born a century later in the 2000s.

I didn’t know my grandfather, and the unresolved grief I had for somebody I never had a conversation with persists. Until now, it’s still suspected that the mantis on the wall—the , sometimes brown, white or black moths with a tear on its wing, was him. And still, in my subconscious belief that I carried since I was a kid, I perceived death as hiatus thinking that dead people would stop being dead, and I thought Emeterio would be cured from it. In my naivete, I thought he’d come back—but before I was even here, my mom already stopped waiting.

There is only so little of what’s left of a person, and to fathom that a person lived a full life, sometimes half of it, or too early—even before an average life expectancy until all that’s left of them now is bone and decay. We are food for worms, says John Keating in Dead Poets Society. It’s humbling to die, and it’s devastating to be gone and face your own end like the rest of humanity, or even seeing others facing theirs. Sometimes, to grieve is to expect somebody’s return, but a dead person isn’t coming back, so what you could only do is to stare at the tombstone, as if it were to look at a past history. The craftsmanship of a stone tablet—the dagger beside their engraved name, and a star beside their birthdate. It was suddenly bright when that person was once alive, now neighboring other gravestones; a permanent cemetery resident.

When I heard the intro lick of Octopus Garden played for the first time, I looked at my mom. There was a symptomatic reaction that was triggered by a kind of nostalgia, only from a person who listened to the radio, almost, all her life. Octopus Garden was one of the songs from Abbey Road she remembers the title of. In the dark, lurking in the alleyways, hiding—I knew Emeterio was there somewhere in those tracks and b-sides, and even maybe after 1986, he was still here. My grandfather had a cassette copy of Abbey Road that was flushed away in a storm back in 1990. I thought about the Pixar film, Coco—that the dead could be survived by the living, and when you forget them, they’ll vanish when no longer remembered. I doubt Emeterio would be gone, and I began to think of it as an inheritance, how the music was passed on. From my grandfather, to my mother, and then to me. My grandfather was survived by music, and music lives; that is for sure. When I think about those four men on a pedestrian, all legs synched as they crossed—I think about legacy, and afterlife. I live by Abbey Road sometimes, when I think about my family.