Grandparents 1
When I was little, I used to spend a lot of time at my paternal grandparents’ house. There are pictures of me in a little yellow outfit, sitting comfortably and looking straight through the camera, positioned on a wooden swing, one of those super old ones that had wooden bars to keep little kids from falling off. The swing hung from a huge old oak tree in my grandparents’ backyard; the thing was so massive it completely overshadowed the house, and the gardens, and the office in a separate structure attached to the carport.
I always maintained a close relationship with my grandmother, but knew little of my grandfather — he died when I was in fourth grade and I remember sitting on my mom’s lap in the church at his funeral, thinking about the messages we had all written on golf balls and placed gingerly in his casket, and wondering why people were crying so hard. It wasn’t like we would never see him again, right? I was in Catholic school, and we had been consistently encouraged to remember the closeness and care given to us by God and Jesus (and sometimes the Holy Spirit, if there was time). So Papa had just moved on to another place, for now, and we shouldn’t be in a purple church with upbeat music and everyone dressed up, just to cry. At least that’s how I felt at the time.
I don’t think I ever saw my grandmother cry in the short time between the discovery of my grandfather’s cancer, and his death. She’s always represented this strong, unmoving person to me, this German woman who uprooted everything to follow a black man to a town where they found a burning cross in their front yard on one of their first nights in a new neighborhood. She didn’t cry at my grandfather’s funeral, and she didn’t cry in the few days he was in the hospital, or when he moved quickly into hospice at their house. At least not that I saw. He wanted to die at home, he insisted on it, and though my mom tells me now that his last hours were in the hospital, I remember that as backwards. I distinctly remember early November, and sitting in the warm emptiness of my grandparents’ living room, cleared of everything but a hospital bed, all of us surrounding my grandfather as he took slow, steady breaths.
My mom tells me that one of her proudest moments as a parent was when we went to visit my grandfather in the hospital for the first time. It wasn’t her parents, but she still took me out of school early; I don’t remember seeing my father there though I know he came. We walked into the hospital room, it was cold and sterile, and there was a stereotypically crackling old tv mounted in the corner, and uncomfortable chairs dragged into crooked angles. My grandfather was at the point in his sickness that most time spent with him was just dedicated to watching his breath move slowly with the help of machines, but when I walked in, he noticed. He opened his eyes just barely, and called me over. My mom, worried about the reaction of a naive nine year old in a room clearly dedicated to death, watched as I let go of her hand and walked over with no qualms, pulled myself gently onto the side of his bed, and offered my cheek up to him for a kiss. If my mom’s and my roles had been switched, I probably would have cried at the mixture of innocence and maturity.
Everyone in my family tells me now that my grandfather loved me in a way that was special, and apparent. Although I really never got to know him that well. I remember him sitting at the head of the kitchen table, I can picture the way my grandmother so clearly loved him, would do anything for him, I even remember his small smiles, but I don’t remember why he might’ve considered me so special. Perhaps it has something to do with the way that I have qualities of my dad, but manifested in such different ways.
When I think of my grandfather, I remember the way the kitchen of my grandparents’ house looked from the top of the fridge (my dad lifted me up there sometimes). I think of his glasses, picture my grandmother diligently picking up golf balls from the huge lawn before she mowed it, remember how much my little dog Bob would shiver on his skinny legs and bark at him. He was such a mystery to me, and yet my family’s assurances about his fondness for me as his oldest granddaughter gives me the confidence to believe that I knew him more than I understood back then. What does a child know how to do better than be herself in front of adults, anyway, right?
It’s only been in the years following my grandfather’s death that I’ve begun to understand the significance of relationships, of deaths, of beginnings and endings. I get little glimpses of memories sometimes, feel surprised at the depth of relationships I never really understood as existing back then. I guess sometimes we just don’t know how visible we really can be.
