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Grandpa Hank, Ghost of Cheese

When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.

When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.

Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.

It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?

"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."

My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.

You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.

I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!

---

My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.

But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.

Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."

But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.

I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.

And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.

He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.

I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.

I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.

I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.

I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.

When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.

My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.

---

It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.

But he needed a fair amount of help.

He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.

One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.

And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.

It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.

---

For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.

I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.

I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.

Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.

Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.

It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.

Then I fell asleep.

I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.

I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.

My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.

I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.

So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.

And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.

And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.

So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.

But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.

And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.

Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.

Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.

A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.

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