Open Up Your Heart

So I our family knows this guy who runs a little shop which sells sweets and savoury foods. He was a nice man with deep blue eyes and a big brown moustache which had turned grey with old age. One thing I didn't like about him though was that you could be as nice to him as you could, but he wouldn't really open up to you and quite a lot of the time he was quite blunt and almost grumpy. So me and my mum went to his shop this morning for some stuff and we went to the checkout and we all had a bit of a conversation. Suddenly the subject changed to lost loved ones, yesterday my dad left to Afghanistan to see my grandad because he's so ill, so my mum told him all about it, and he suddenly said "wait a second" and went into his white van with quite a bit of haste. He stayed there a minute or so but I knew something wasn't right and I started getting uncomfortable. He came out of the van with a sad smile on his face and his eyes deeper than ever, his face was almost sympathetic and he had this brown crumpled up wallet in his hand, out of the wallet he pulled out a photo and he showed us. This is the exact same quote " 17 years today.. She was so young, that's my little grandson in her arms" by then we figured out what he meant, he continued to say something which nearly brought tears to my eyes and i'm a hard person to break(emotionally). " when I lost her, I lost my life" we all just looked at him and he did that same sad smile again, then he showed us a neatly folded piece of newspaper, on it was an article about a young woman who has passed away because of kidney failure, "my son's girlfriend she was". Then he said something to us that we would never expect HIM to say to us, you see we always saw him as a nice but hard to socialise with person, he didn't really open up to people and he's always been a bit blunt. He said " whenever someone comes into my store and moans about life, I just send them away and tell them I'm busy but I know you people have a big heart, you see, life is hard darling but you've always got to remember, there's always a person worse of than you". He then just smiled at us while putting the stuff back into his wallet while saying " I can never take myself away from these memories, I just miss them too much but you just have to stay strong", we just smiled, he gave us our change and we left, I now know that people are not as harsh as they seem, the world has just turned them cold on the outside, and we can't make anyone open up to us, but we can help them to trust us so they then open up to us. Because sometimes all we need is a hug.