I remember the last time I saw my grandpa. It was a Saturday, on the 14th of July, in 2007. The day of my seventeenth birthday.
17 wasn’t a big deal. 16 and 18, they’re great. But for me, my seventeenth birthday was just another day on the calendar in my countdown to ‘legal’.
There was no party, just a handful of friends who came over to swim. I remember how pumped my friends and I were for the last Harry Potter book that was coming out in exactly a week. I remember somebody ordered it for me as a birthday gift. We were all yelling Unforgiveable Curses at each other while we ducked, dodged, and threw water-balls around. (Oh yeah, we were awesomely mature for 17.)
Amidst our goofing around, the occasional family member would stop by the house with a gift. I would get out of the pool and go make an obligatory visit and say my thank you(s), and then go right back to the pool. Sometimes they would stay and visit with my mother even after I’d returned to my friends. On that day, my grandpa came to visit. Mom called out to me and told me he was there.
After I went inside to greet him he came back outside with me and my parents and was showing us around his new Harley. He told us how he was leaving in two weeks to go on a Poker Run with a few of his riding buddies. He was so excited.
I remember it was the happiest I’d seen my grandpa since grandma died, maybe even before. He’d finally started moving on. He was seeing someone new, whom we hadn’t met yet. He’d bought the bike. He had a show-car. I can’t even remember the make and model but it was white with green stripped seats. He was going fishing and golfing, and finally moving on from the loss of his wife.
Grandpa invited me to come out to the house sometime that week. I told him I couldn’t, that Dani and I had drum-line practice throughout the week. He offered me a ride on the Harley, but I declined. My sister accepted and while they were out I went back into the house to get some food, and took it poolside. An hour or so later mom came out to tell me Grandpa was leaving. I went inside and said my goodbyes and gave him a hug. I heard friends calling to me outside. A rushed “I love you!”, and I was out the back door to the pool again.
More people came and went. It was a good day, and I went to bed so happy that night. I had no idea how bittersweet that day, my birthday, would very soon turn out to be for me. The week full of drumline practice came, and by Friday, the 20th, I was pooped. And on that day I came home just like every other, and sat infront of the TV.
…
20 minutes away, in a creekside small town, a man pulls off of a windy country road and into his driveway. He’s worked a long hard day at a factory, where the fans blow so loudly he turns his hearing aid off so that the noise doesn’t bother him. He gets out of his truck and walks to the end of his driveway.
To the left is a hill in the road. It’s always difficult to tell if anyone is coming. It was the sort of driveway that you roll your windows down and turn the radio down and wait before pulling out of. You put your foot on the gas, and hope you make the turn before someone comes barreling down the hill. The man waits, and when he is certain no one’s coming he crosses the road to his mailbox. He stands at the mailbox and shuffles through it, lifting and tilting his glasses now and again to make out the words written on the envelopes a bit more clearly. When he’s finished sifting through it, he goes to cross the street again.
The sound echoes off the hills like thunder. Some describe it like a gun shot.
…
A phone rings at my home. I look at the caller ID. I recognize the name of the neighbor, friend, and reverend, Tom, who spoke at my grandmother’s funeral the past fall.
“Brie, would you get that?”
I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Gabrielle, could I speak to your dad?”
I thought it odd that Tom was calling for Dad. My mother mouthed to me “Who is it?”
“Tom _______” I replied.
I’m not sure why, but my mother began to pester my Dad, asking if something happened to my uncle. Every time someone calls with something serious, we always assume at first it’s my uncle, if that tells you anything about the kind of life he has led.
This time, I had no assumptions. If it was Tom calling… and calling for Dad… then it must be Grandpa… but I relaxed. My grandpa had Diverticulitis, and had many problems with it that had in the past required hospitalization. Maybe Tom was calling about that. Maybe…
I just stared at my mother, who was fixed on my Dad while he listened to Tom on the other end.
…
I remember when we were very young we would go get the mail for grandma and grandpa. I remember how my mother used to panic when she heard about/saw us crossing that road. I never understood the big deal. To me, it was as simple as looking both ways before crossing.
I tell myself all that time that if I could go back, I would have said to hell with drumline. (I ended up being kicked off that year for an attitude problem anyways.) I would have gone and visited my grandpa on that Friday like any other. And I would’ve checked his mail for him. But logic tells me that I wouldn’t have gone over there ‘til after he got off work anyways. So there’s nothing I could have done, in any circumstance.
The only part I had in any of it, was to stand there and watch as my mother crumbled.
“Is it Lanny?” She asked about my uncle. My father shook his head. “Dad?” He nodded and continued listening to the voice on other end of the phone, then the call ended and he was silent. My dad explained, up until the part where the truck met my grandfather.
We gasped.
“Is he okay?” Mom asked.
“… No,” Dad said.
With that “No,” the whole atmosphere of the dining room changed.
It went quiet before my mom spoke again.
“Is he… alive?”
She barely got the word out while the tears filled her eyes.
My father cringed. “… No.”
And beyond that, I can’t remember everything for sure.
…
I remember going to the house a few days later. I remember seeing the chair. The burgundy recliner that sat in the corner. I recalled every memory of coming into his home and around the kitchen wall to see him seated in that chair. The chair I’d sat in with him as a child while we watched Jeopardy and shouted out the answers. That chair and it’s empty presence was cruelty. The quiet house that still had their smell, even my grandma’s after all those months, and it taunted me.
I remember how I started to shake when I saw the skid marks on the road. I remember being showed the markers. Where the impact happened, and all the way down the hill, where my grandfather had… ended up. I heard the story about the neighbor woman who went to him just barely with a pulse and tried her damnest to give him CPR. I heard about how awful it was when my uncle went to ID his body… the road rash. *cringe* I saw his boots… made for long-lasting durability and the toughest circumstances, crumbled and torn. I saw his phone, his watch, and his glasses, each in pieces. We were even given the mail he’d been carrying to the other side.
All these bits of him, in bits.
I could only fathom what actually had become of him. My mother and I both had nightmares about it, we still do around this time of year. We think of how much he must have suffered. And how much our family suffered for a while after-the-fact because the man who hit him was afraid he’d get in trouble, so he lied and said my grandpa walked out in-front of him until the story was set straight.
Philip was staying with his grandparents when the accident happened. I didn’t even have him. I spent my spare time doing only one other thing, writing.
When he showed up to the funeral, I was so happy. He walked with me to the front of the room where the flowers and the display boards were set up. And in the middle of all of that, was a little wooden box, with a fisherman, a lake, a motorcycle, and other things that spoke of grandpa that were carved into the grain. I ran my hands over it one last time and said my goodbyes.
I spent most the day in a “break room” type area with coffee and vending machines at the back of the funeral home. I spoke to Philip; I didn’t have much to say to anyone else. When I wasn’t reading Harry Potter the past few days, I had been writing. I would speak up soon enough. And when the preacher asked if anyone wanted to say a few words, I rose to my feet. And, in between tears, I spoke to the congregation of what my grandfather meant to me. I’m not even sure they understood half of what I was saying, I was crying so heavily through it.
The only part that I remember to this day, again I think I’ve buried a lot of this and have made myself forget about it, was the ending, which really was the only thing that mattered then and matters now:
“My mother tells me, although I hardly remember, of a time my grandfather was fixing the roof on his garage. I was just barely a toddler, and I jumped on the ladder and started climbing my way up to him so that I could be with him. Today, in a different way, I go away from this knowing I am still climbing that ladder.”
Will I reach him again? I don’t know.
No one knows. You can’t claim to know these things. You can read it, you can consider it, and you can hope for it—- which I do. But you can’t really know for sure just because someone wrote a book and claims it to be true.
… Sometimes I have nightmares about death now… Or that I’m being embalmed/autopsied… Or that I’m being cremated and seeing my skin burn, but feeling nothing. If you’ll believe it, it gets worse. And it’s all because of something that happened three years ago that I will never be able to shake.
It’s not as if he was the first one in my family to pass away. My uncle Floyd died of cancer when I was 9 or 10; my aunt Beth was taken in a car crash when I was 12, my great grandpa died in a nursing home just days after I’d last visited him around the same age, and my grandma died quite suddenly one Tuesday when her body just decided to give out on her.
It can do that. And someday mine might. My body might decide to just stop. And that will be the end of it. Even the things we think we have control over, we have none. One day I will feel the death rattle, and in my last seconds I’ll feel my heartbeat slow down. I can think in my head “Not yet,” and “fight” as much as I want, but it won’t guarantee any results.
But with my grandpa, it was different. He had no chance to fight. There was no control that he could try to grasp at in his last moments.
This body is the one thing that is mine, and no matter how well I take care of it, something will kill me one day. There is no control, there is no certainty in the when, or the how… only that it will be.
Think about it the next time you rush through a goodbye with a loved one. Think about it when you cross the street. Will these be the last tokens of love you leave your family, will this be the last thing you ever do?
And please, on this day, think about my grandpa, too.
Slightly Awesome 