Origin Piece Proposal

My origin piece (tentative) for this assignment will be a digital diary entry I made in honor of my late grandfather. The title for the diary entry was called "fragmentary memories of me with my grandfather”, and it’s a piece I wrote about everything that I remember about him as a person, our interactions, and even borrowed memories I have of him from stories my family would tell me and/or each other. I wrote this about two years ago, and I don’t remember the context well, but the purpose of the entry was just so that I won't forget those memories in the future. This entry was written with only myself in mind, although reading back, it feels less like a diary entry, and more like a straightforward collection of brain data. As the author of the piece, at the time my role was mainly being a data collector from a personal (but not emotional) standpoint. And simultaneously, I made myself the only audience to this piece whose job was to piece together the big picture of my relationship with my grandfather through what I know of him and what experiences I had with him.  

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Choosing this piece (tentative), I would like to transform it into an elegy, a genre that I have had some experience reading and have been fascinated with for a long time. Eulogies I have read in the past have always taken on a literary, narrative form, invoking emotions in the author along with the audience(s) of the piece. This is why in writing this new piece, I would like to transform raw data into something more emotional that would help transform my memories and strengthen my relationship with my grandfather, as well as honor him in a way that I couldn’t before. And as this is an eulogy as opposed to a diary entry, the audience I will be addressing will be those who will be reading this eulogy (which are classmates and not my family members), however the invoked audience will be my family, along with those who know and admire my grandfather as much as, if not even more than, I do. And in this scenario, I would like to imagine this to be what I would have written (and presented) if I had gotten the chance to write an eulogy for him, and this will be an opportunity for me to truly introduce him to people who don’t know of him from my perspective. 

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Through writing this piece, I hope to build a stronger connection with my grandfather, honor him, and (imaginarily) reach my family and share my perspectives with them in thanks to them having shared their memories of him with me for most of my life. I also hope to encourage a larger conversation about grief and honoring people who are no longer present in our lives outside the premise of a therapy session, in a joyful (and perhaps artistic) way, that would refrain it from becoming a taboo or awkward or pity-inducing subject to discuss.