Whenever I reach back for the few memories I have of my grandpa, there is one quality of his that I like to think he gifted me without him even showing me or telling me in any explicit fashion. Maybe even he wasn’t aware that he was handing me down this way of being that I’ve carried with me like a hidden gem. My grandpa owned a quiet and profound reservedness that earned him respect among those who gathered to listen to him when he chose to speak at all. In much the same way, I am usually careful with the words I let fall out of my mouth, and I generally pick and choose when I open it in public, which is rare and brief. Even though I believe we had this verbal reticence in common, we still didn’t hold many conversations together. I had always seen him as this grand patriarch, and I got the impression, starting as his first grandchild, that when you were in the same room as him, you only spoke when spoken to. Later, when I became an adolescent and then a maturing adult I spent less and less time around him, which meant less opportunity to try and connect with him.
The summer of 1997 was when a large piece of my world seemed to break off and leave me adrift. I was in my mid-20s, going to graduate school, and living at home during the break. It was the summer when I would get up at five o’clock in the morning and drive through the dewy, humid air just to arrive at the parking lot of the Happy Ice factory ten minutes before the work horn sounded. It was the summer when my dad tackled me to the floor in the hallway just outside my bedroom because I dared turn my back on him when he was getting on my case on a day I just didn’t want to hear him sniping anymore. It was the summer my beloved grandpa would leave the first gaping hole in my family.
My last vivid memory of my grandpa was Father’s Day of that same year. In a thickening cloud of smoke, I stood next to him by the grill as he took slow drags off his cigarette. He inhaled his own worst enemy and exhaled any sort of pleasure he had derived from that habit. Occasionally, cars zipped past our house on their way to the park at the lake. This elderly, stern man looked straight ahead and made not a sound. If I had known about his real medical condition at the time, I would have been more sympathetic to how he may have seen the movement of the world gradually slowing down to a few blurs as his mind became entangled in the Knowledge that everything was about to stop for him, permanently. The burger patties on the grill gave off a time-honored, fragrant scent. I wonder if he couldn’t help but harken back to all the Father’s Days he witnessed and those he would never be a part of again. Of course, I couldn’t read his mind: all I could do was look at him through the haze.
Still wearing my hooded sweatshirt, dungarees, and work boots, I occasionally turned my head ever so slightly to take in my grandpa’s posture and his visage, missing every part of him already. To cut through the awkward tension, I desperately wanted to say something. Anything that could be considered thoughtful or interesting I tried thinking of. But nothing came. The space between us was just occupied by a young man with everything to give and an old man simply waiting out his last moments on earth.
From the moment my grandfather set eyes on me and the moment when I learned to call him ‘grandpa’ our own corner of the world was already fixed in the tiny filaments of a flash cube on top of a Kodak camera. As an impressionable tot, my time together with my grandpa mainly consisted of sitting at the kitchen table and watching my grandma make grilled cheese sandwiches for us to eat in the family room while we watched Sunday afternoon football. He would be sitting in his easy chair casually blowing white cigarette smoke up into the air. I would be sitting on the couch, hunched over the meal tray, and enjoying watching the smoke float up to the ceiling and then bounce off the sunlight, blossoming into hundreds of tiny wispy curlicues. Even as my surly adolescence widened the distance between me and him, I rarely hesitated biking to my grandparents’ house to mow the lawn or trim the tall bushes when requested. Helping out my grandpa with yardwork ― made more difficult because of his crippling arthritis ― was the clearest way to show him my respect and love.
As I stood near my grandpa on that one Father’s Day, a mess of emotions bubbled inside my head. I sensed something coming to a close between us, but I knew I couldn’t express such a fraught and complicated vision to him, just out of the blue and with no rational reason behind it. I remember opening my mouth to awkwardly recount my day of work at the ice factory and what I hoped to accomplish after finishing grad school, without knowing that he would not even live to witness another one of my graduation ceremonies. Grandpa just glared out over the wavy blacktop of the driveway and gave no response. Holding his omnipresent cigarette between his two fingers, he took a drag, lifted his chin slightly upward, and puffed out a stream of white smoke that mixed with the smoke wafting off the sizzling grill. I turned to look at my grandpa’s profile for a split second. That’s when I felt an immense heat radiating out from his face as if it had become the burning sun and I was a mere mortal who ignored the fair warnings about looking for proof of sunspots. He appeared to be levitating in the sunlight. The look on his face seemed to tell me that he was trying to decide what to pack for a long-awaited trip home.
One day in late August, the news of my grandpa’s impending death was waiting for me as I thawed out in the truck on the ride back home from the ice factory. When I opened the front door to the house, peeled off my soaked jacket and pants, kicked off my duct-taped boots, my parents promptly told me that my grandpa didn’t have long to live. Cancer cells were multiplying rapidly inside his lungs and treatment would be long and arduous. Per his wishes, he elected against doctors pumping chemotherapy drugs through his veins and radiating throughout his once proud, but fragile, frame. He wished to accept the disease on his own fatal terms. Before turning in his key to his Maker, the only condition grandpa had was that his wife and four kids gather in the same bedroom, where both of them had started their family, to listen to his last, shallow breaths.
I have a photo of my grandpa sitting on the seat of a toy bus that was meant for my 3- or 4-year-old body. The photo was probably taken in the basement of the house where my parents cleared a space for a makeshift toy room for my two siblings and me. My grandpa’s knees are comically above his elbows and his feet planted on both pedals. He must have been in his early 50s because his body looked kind of svelte and his hair was a bit longer and lusher, although he was definitely balding quickly. What stays with me to this day is his wide effervescent grin and his lively magnified eyes behind those thick-lensed glasses he would always wear. I get the impression that he both enjoyed eliciting my toddler giggles, as I watched a silly giant peddling a ridiculously small vehicle around in circles, and hamming it up for the adults in the room. The photo captured a jovial man who can never be duplicated. It reminds me, once again, that he and I shared a life together on this once-in-a-lifetime planet.
After my grandpa was laid to rest my grandma withdrew into her house and flatly refused to go to any social gatherings. During the times I came to visit her, she usually would be sitting in her easy chair in the dark looking listlessly out the front window. I wanted to tell her that I understood all too well how she was feeling, but I knew that would be too presumptuous. I simply wanted to give her something to smile about, even for just a brief moment. I wanted my warm, youthful heart to enter that frigid state and rekindle the verve it once had. However, I came to understand that what my grandma was going through had nothing to do with me. That my presence had no business being anywhere near where she had situated herself. It was only years later, after her own death, that I could understand the undeniable grief that made her sit in her easy chair for hours on end in the comfortable quiet of a darkened room, just to stare at the border between grass and asphalt and wonder when her time would come to finally join her dearly departed husband.
The repetitive and predictable routine at the ice factory helped me phase out the rest of the green world and concentrate on the clouded, inert contents of ice cubes. But I couldn’t keep out the effects of the numbing of my brain and body that transformed each bag of ice into a sad memory of my grandpa’s corpse, lying all genteel and stiff in his casket. His made-up face betrayed not a trace of the pain he suffered through when he whimpered and threw off the bed covers as each mutinous cell hardened inside his lungs. As I dragged each full plastic bag from the conveyor belt, held it in my arms, and threw it on the pallet, the awareness of this man’s recent departure from my world brought a newly sharpened ache through my bones. The machines continued to clank, spewing out more ice as they’ve been programmed to do, and I redoubled my efforts to make sure I met the day’s quota.
