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Losing a loved one can be one of the most difficult experiences to overcome. In Beyond the Last Goodbye, I am able to express my emotions about my grandparents’ death and handle my grief through poetry, a method I didn’t think of as grieving. Losing my grandfather to cancer was something I couldn’t quite grasp. I understood what death was and how he wasn’t going to come back but not being able to understand that a long-term illness would take him away is something I still have trouble coping with. In recent years, my grandmother was always in and out of the hospital but I never once thought she would die so soon. Her passing was expected but I didn’t want to admit to myself that she would also be gone. This feeling of unfamiliarity with death overwhelmed me and began to impact my day-to-day life.  Not being able to properly cope with their deaths has encouraged me to learn more about different coping strategies and stages of grief people experience, after avoiding the method of coping myself. At first, it was easier for me to bottle up my emotions and not share the pain I was feeling. This was before I was introduced to different types of poetry and was able to let my emotions flow through rhyming words and stanzas. In this collection, I share my personal feelings and coping methods while highlighting the different grieving stages people experience.