In the early morning hours of November 28th, 2018, my grandfather died. He died on the day before my grandmother’s birthday.
My mother had called me three days prior with the news that he wasn’t able to swallow anymore, that he would likely die quickly of malnourishment. A muscle reflex leftover from a stroke he had had in his fifties, triggered by a recent case of pneumonia, had caused it. It was like every part of his body’s history was coming together at once, a big reunion episode before the finale. It was like medical jargon Mad Libs.
I was in shock. After all this time, after all these ailments stacking up like Jenga pieces, precarious, any one of them ready to topple and begin his collapse, it baffled me that something so fundamental would be his undoing.
I had always known him as immortal, the man who had survived against all odds, the man who shouldn’t have returned home from the war waged by his lymph nodes. And now he was in the trenches once again, dying of starvation.
My mother passed the phone to my grandmother who, when asked how she was doing, simply sighed and replied, “Well, things aren’t too great over here.” It was always like this: emotions compacted, bottled into facts, shielded in voice but felt behind tired eyes. In that moment, I wanted to meet her eyes. I wanted to hold her hand.
My grandmother passed the phone to my grandfather, whose voice was faint and frail and more upbeat than it had been in months. He made a half-muddled joke about football. We’d never talked about football before.
As he faded from the phone I heard him wish me a happy birthday, and I didn’t care that I had been twenty for over five months, and I didn’t care that I was in the backseat of an Uber, unconsciously relaying half a nonesense conversation to a 35-year-old driver from Dearborn Heights. All I cared about was making sure he couldn’t hear me crying. The tears covered my face in sheets. My sobs became staccato chuckles, laughs without breath, as I thanked him for the birthday wishes.
Before the phone was passed off to someone else, I told him I’d see him soon. I’m still not sure why.
After finally hanging up, I curled into a ball and cried in the back of a stranger’s white Nissan Sentra. I cried because I missed him already: I missed who he once was and who I wished he could have been to me. I cried because I was trying to find a positive outlook, and the phrases running through my mind (“at least it won’t be a heart attack,” “at least it’s not cancer anymore,” “at least he won’t die of depression”) broke my heart. I cried because I had spent an entire semester writing about his body and the disease that once inhabited it, never once picking up the goddamn phone to ask for his side. I cried because he had always been more of a story to me than a man, and I wasn’t ready to read the last chapter and close the book.
The night before he died, I had a missed call from my grandmother. I returned it in a panic—whatever she was calling about at 11 o’clock at night must have been important. She picked up the phone and, when asked what was going on, just laughed. “I pressed the wrong button!” she admitted.
We talked about school and cousins and how to ritz up stovetop stuffing (the secret? Fresh celery and water chestnuts––something to add extra crunch). She mentioned that my mother had shown her a short article I had written about my grandfather’s fight with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and inquired if I would be willing to read it at his inevitable memorial service. I faltered for a moment, trying to rationalize why she would want me to read the equivalent of half a New York Times first draft, and a shitty one at that, in front of a hundred grieving people. What did it say about my relationship with him, or how I felt? What solace would it provide those strangers, or my family?
“A lot of people know what happened during that period of his life, Brooks, but a lot of people don’t know. I just think it would be nice to inform people about what he went through.” Her explanation didn’t surprise me. None of this did. She spoke in a tone so familiar, emotionless but not uncaring: matter-of-fact. She wanted people to know the facts and nothing more. I told her I’d reread my writing, revise, really consider her proposal. And I have, and I will.
But I didn’t know how to explain to her the facts I felt, the ones I actually wanted to share with the countless nameless faces I’d encounter on the day of the memorial service. How could I argue the relevance of describing my grandfather’s smile when I visited or the way it felt when we hugged? How could I prove the importance of describing his raised eyebrows and downturned eyes just before he’d beat us all at hearts and rummy and Dutch blitz? How could I tell her that his identity is made of more than a disease, or a recovery, or a miracle? How could I tell her he shouldn’t be put to rest as a medical anomaly, but as a grandfather, a father, a husband, a person?
***
I wrote this piece the morning my grandfather passed away. In a daze of early morning shivers and shock, I released this stream of words, fully formed, into the notes app on my phone. Never before had a block of text come to me so quickly, so coherently, so violently. I felt shaken. I felt empty. I felt so, so alone.
This is the first time I have seen these words since I wrote them over two months ago. I wasn’t sure what to do with all of the hurt I had so quickly spilled and bottled up, so I kept it locked up in my phone, safe from myself. Reading it now, I’m still not sure if I’m ready to feel all of the anger and grief I experienced in the immediate aftermath of my grandfather’s death, but I’m sitting here bathing in it through the glow of my computer screen all the same.
Since I wrote this, I attended my grandfather’s memorial service, and I read the piece my grandmother requested. It felt stiff and cold, and the funny parts didn’t feel so funny anymore. I wish someone had laughed, instead of staring back at me with furrowed brows. I guessed what they were all thinking, it echoed in my head: “Why is she reading us a scientific article? Doesn’t she care?”
Glancing over at my grandmother, I saw her smile. The space between my ribs softened a bit, and I could breathe. The confusion and hurt that radiates from the piece above hasn’t faded within me; I know that will take a while. But if I could do this small thing to ease her grief, I could forget all those feelings for a second. I could get over myself a little and live with that.
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 