My grandfather died a year ago today.
My immediate family, led valiantly by my mom, spent the year and half before fighting along side him. It was a giant morbid and ragged crescendo starting from frequent visits to daily visits to three visit a day. From cooking meals to feeding three meals a day. Then came trips to the emergency room, the ICU, rehab, meals again, back to the ICU, and then to a specialty care hospital. This, amidst the care of my grandmother (his wife) who suffered a series of falls, miniature strokes, and dementia/Alzheimer's. All while balancing jobs, the rapidly expanding farm, college education, and concerts/recital/musicals. The strength and determination of Mom and Dad never ceases to amaze me. Yet, despite all of our collective effort, Grandpa passed away.
Loss
We spent his last day with him.
That day will always be a dark day for me. As Grandpa’s condition declined in late November he first moved to an ICU, then to a specialty care hospital. We (Mom, Dad, and Ian), all traveled down to visit him that day. It’s a two and a half hour trip to Dansville, PA, and it was made longer by the series of events that unfolded.
Mom’s cell-phone rang: it was the Doctor. I should take second here to note that this is my recollection, in paraphrase, of the conversations that follow. I was not on the phone, but have the recounting from Mom. As you can imagine, the accuracy breaks down over time and telling. But the intent and tone remain.
The doctor demanded that we get to the hospital. Grandpa’s blood pressure had dropped severely and he would not make it through the day. Four hearts sank, then roared into a panic in the car.
“We are already on our way,” said Mom.
Ten minutes later, the phone rings again: the doctor a second time.
“Yes, we a literally in the car driving down. [a pause] What do you mean, ‘what do want us to do?’”
At this point a nurse gets on the phone speaking as if slow, loud, and over-enunciated words will clear us of some stupidity and drive home what we already know: “your father is dying.”
Thank you for the insight.
We raced down to the hospital. We were walking briskly through the parking garage when they call again to tell us Grandpa is dying. “We are in the parking garage!” responded Mom, well beyond exasperated.
We made it to the Grandpa’s hospital room. A flurry of nurses and doctors followed us down the hall... they had been waiting. In my memory I remember a nurse stepping up to the nurse’s station and announcing our arrival with a terse “they’re here.”
We opened the blinds, turned up the lights, and put Grandpa’s glasses on. We hadn’t been there 30 seconds when the doctor, palliative care nurse, the charge nurse, all demanded a meeting with mom. They insisted on taking Mom (and Dad, he won’t leave Mom’s side) into a separate conference room. What followed was a short meeting and then over an hour of various levels of “care” professionals mincing words and implying that we should pull the plug. If looks could kill, my brother would have murdered every non-family member in that room. It felt like the battle of Helm’s Deep; waves of staff members in various combinations marching in and staring at Mom, then moving their sights to Dad, Ian, and me. My personal favorite was the doctor on duty that day: “People are born. And then they die. You’ve had a year to deal with this.” I have great respect for the health care profession, and the people that devote their lives to healing others. These were not those people.
Meanwhile, we all took turns sitting and holding Grandpa's hand, looking into his eyes. He was conscious and pretty alert. He squeezed my hand and even did his famous eye-roll-raised-eyebrow expression of disbelief and annoyance mixed with ridiculousness at the fuss of the ventilator and nurses, etc. I talked to him about school, the upcoming musical, and Carnegie Hall. He listened, but, due to his ventilator, couldn’t respond. Mom brought along a “iHome” and we played some of his favorite music. As the morning went on he slipped further away.
We went to lunch, and when we came back Grandpa was not as alert, and much more groggy. We stayed for awhile longer, fended off the doctors some more, before finally leaving. We all said our goodbyes; I think deep down we all knew that these were goodbyes for good. It was terrible.
By 9 pm Grandpa was gone.
Grief
A week later we held a service, and a few days later, once the dust had settled, the grief set in. Everything had a pall to it, as if the world were covered in the off-yellow stains of dirty teeth. Nothing felt right. I felt constantly cold inside. I felt hungry but unable to eat. Conversations felt forced. I felt short of temper, and easily offended. “So sorry for your loss” became so common I barely registered it. And I felt tired; not the end of a hard day’s work tired, but a bone deep weariness that pulled at my very core.
Suddenly, the things that I found solace and joy in were completely devoid of enjoyment. Barely able to muster the emotional energy that my teaching style requires, I awoke each morning in dread of the upcoming day. Long hours on projects felt like torture. Each passing minute was agony; trying to find something to look forward to was impossible. When I did look forward to something it was not the usual powerful inferno of excitement; instead it was more like a weak pilot-light struggling to stay lit in a drafty basement.
Most difficult to reconcile in my head was how the rest of the world keeps moving. Flying into a rage became easier than ever before, an escalation I feared would get me into trouble and I contained it in my own head (in fact, I had the fewest outbursts during the musical production than ever before; I was afraid my temper would reign). All requests, criticisms, and conversations became points of internal rage; I wanted to shout:
“How can you all go about your lives, and be happy, and demand things of me when I feel as if my whole universe is slowly imploding on me! How dare you! Who cares about trips, Carnegie Hall tickets, or what the weather is like. Can’t you see the impending darkness?! Can’t you feel my desolation?!?!”
Sometimes I felt completely numb.
Logically I knew the world must go on and the people I encountered were unmoved. And why would they be upset? Grief is a personal process, but it was difficult nonetheless. As I look back on the last year I hope that these feelings did not manifest themselves to those around me and push them away, especially those who are special and important to me. Only those with similar experiences of tremendous grief escaped my selfish inner-wrath, and to them I am eternally grateful. I can only hope to be as understanding and supportive to future grievers as they were to me.
Healing
It is a painfully slow process to move out of grief. As of today, I feel better than I have since Grandpa’s diagnosis over a year ago. But it has been a long road. Scratch that. It has been like jumping into a pool and holding on to the bottom until your lungs are screaming for oxygen. Then swimming for the surface but the water has become molasses. It’s thick and heavy and hard to move through. It’s nearly impossible to see through it. Sometimes you are swimming in the wrong direction. Sometimes you just stay there, mired in the darkness. Sometimes you want to struggle out and sometimes you feel like giving up. But eventually you surface and pull in that deep breath of cool air. Sometimes you trip and fall back in and it starts all over.
I’m still in the pool, but I feel as if I may be able to get out, or maybe learn to swim. I know I will always carry this grief with me, but in time it will fade to a manageable level. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Legacy
I did not, and still do not, fully comprehend how interwoven my grandfather is in my fabric of being. It feels as if someone took a handful of knitted sweater and tore it straight out, leaving a hole with hundreds of threads hanging bare. This tattered hole is all too painful to invent, and his absence has made his influence come into focus. It could be argued that I am inventing connections to fill a gap in my life, but I do not believe this to be true.
I now own the house that my grandparents built up from rafters, and spent much of this summer cleaning, painting, and repairing it. Moving into my house, a house that I spent time in as a child, cared for my grandparents as they failed, and am now rearranging and emptying has been both cathartic and overwhelming. I have seen within these walls the happy vibrant lives they lived, but also witnessed the signs of their slow decline into illness. However, I do not regret my decision (or massive debt) for a moment. Sifting through their lives has brought a lot of emotions to the surface, most of which I won’t discuss in this format. But it has brought into focus the complexity of life; there is so much subtly that is too often missed.
Early this past summer I had to rewire a light switch in my kitchen, one that Grandpa put in some 40 years ago when he built this house. It was an old model switch and I had to replace it. I used my intuition to attach each wire to its proper place, closed up the junction box, and turned the circuit breaker back on. The lights did not work properly (three way switches are tricky if not labeled properly and you’ve never actually wired one before). I sighed, thought about it all night, pulled out a book, and tried again. It worked.
This minor victory became suddenly poignant as I realized the many ways Grandpa was with me in this simple repair. The obvious observation is this was his house, his wired switch. But it’s deeper than that: the patience to work through to the solution- wiring it wrong, puzzling out the error, and then going back and trying again, is a trait that I absolutely learned from spending time working with Grandpa.
But even greater than both of those: the courage to try. Where others might have hired an electrician (nothing wrong with hiring professionals, I am not above that), he would have tried to fix it himself first. And there I was with my hands inside a light switch, fearlessly trying to fix my kitchen lights by myself.
It makes me think of all the people whose traits, skills, and knowledge have been imparted to me. My dad, my mom, my brother, family, friends... We are arguably just a painting; each color and each stroke is the influence of another person on the canvas of our soul. We form ourselves out of this pallet of people and experiences, swirling and mixing and rearranging the paint as we travel through our lives. As we do so, we leave our own paint on others’ pallets for their canvases. It is overwhelmingly sad when someone’s portrait is done, the paint dries, and we hang them up in the long hallway of people we have lost. And I am scared of the people I know I will lose someday and have to hang up their portraits as well. But I find solace and hope in this: part of them will always exist, because they are part of my portrait. They are part of me, and in turn a part of the people I encounter. So perhaps, though he has passed from the physical world, Grandpa is still a part of me. And in that way he is not gone. He will never be gone.
