Grandpa

My Grandpa
* 15 August 1921 + 25 September 2007

My grandfather was 86 years old when he passed away at 3:10 in the morning last Tuesday. As my mom puts it, “He fell asleep forever.” He fell asleep in his bed, in his apartment where he had lived for as long as I could remember, surrounded by his loved ones.

My grandfather had been very ill for some time and while it sounds very cliché, it’s probably truest to say that he died of a broken heart. His health started to decline after my grandmother passed away. They’d had to go through the apartment then, to search high and low to fulfill her last wish – to be buried in her wedding gown which she had apparently kept for the last 60 years (except nobody knew where). After that, even though family that lived nearby came to visit him often, the apartment where they had lived for many years was just not the same anymore. The days were not the same anymore.

When my parents came to visit us this September, they knew and expected that my grandfather would die soon. Everyone expected it. The whole family, everyone who lived nearby anyway, took turns visiting him at home to do things for him – cook, clean, buy groceries, help him with daily things. He had a nurse that came everyday. A few times, he was hospitalized for various things. I guess everyone was just kind of wondering how much longer he would last.

And so he died, quietly, in his apartment. The day before, he got to meet his youngest great-granddaughter, Claire, for the first time. She’s just a couple of months old. He got to see pictures of Trueman and I that my parents brought with them. And I guess he decided that now was as good a time as any.

I don’t have a lot of useful things to say about my grandfather.

While my family on that side are very close, I was never into doing the “family thing.” (I take after my dad’s side of the family who pretend they were hatched and can’t stand to be in the same room with each other.) I was never really close with anyone in my family and I haven’t seen my grandfather in several years, although I used to write letters and send cards pretty frequently.

I don’t know a whole lot about my grandfather, or my grandmother for that matter, because I never asked. In part that has to do with the fact that I was a really shy kid, and the fact that my grandmother always came across as very disapproving and strict. My grandmother didn’t approve of shenanigans or running or screaming. She didn’t have much use for imagination, but she loved music … and I’m as unmusical as they come. I didn’t enjoy their dark apartment with the off-limits bedroom, the brown 70′s wallpaper, or the big kitchen table with the cheap vinyl tablecloth and the jelly jar cups.

I do know that my grandfather loved to garden. Every weekend and sometimes during the week, he’d be out in his garden where he grew, among other things, delicious strawberries. He would wear a straw hat and his white undershirt and an old pair of slacks with suspenders.

My grandfather loved to smoke his pipe, once a day after the noontime meal, before he settled down on the brown living room couch for his “siesta”. He never smoked on any other occasion, only after lunch and only in his living room.

My grandfather enjoyed a nice tall glass of cold beer. My grandmother always insisted she didn’t want a beer, but always offered to “drink the foam” off of his. He didn’t drink much or often.

My grandfather had a bristly mustache that tickled when he kissed me and (secretly) slipped money into my pocket, telling me to “get myself something nice” and that I was “his favorite granddaughter”. He probably told the same to all my cousins because that’s just the type of person he was.

My grandfather was never loud or rude. He never yelled or screamed. I figure he did all the yelling and screaming when him and my grandmother raised my mother and her five siblings who had an uncanny knack for killing the family pet, a succession of yellow canaries all named Sputnik, who all met their untimely demise by being sat on, stepped on, caught in the door, and in various other ways of canary manslaughter. Either that, or he simply left the yelling to my grandmother who seemed to have more of an aptitude.

My grandfather loved to do the crosswords in the newspaper and he loved to embroider. Yes, my grandfather would sit in his living room, in front of the window so that the light would hit the embroidery hoop just right, and embroider German folk patterns and flowers onto table cloths and other linens.

My grandfather was a German World War II veteran. He served with a field artillery unit in Russia, back when their artillery was drawn by horses. He always used to rib me in a good-natured way about my love of horses because, as he pointed out, he never liked horses. He didn’t like dealing with them. One horse, he would tell me, would always turn its head to bite him in the ass when he put his foot in the stirrup. And when they had an air raid over night, the horses would get loose and they’d have to go find them again.

He had plenty of stories, my grandpa. Stories about the war in Russia. About how it got so cold, if you tried to pee on the side of the road, it would freeze before it hit the ground. About the sound the different shells made when they went out or came in. About how I needed to talk into his good ear during conversations because field artillery does affect one’s hearing.

My grandfather will be buried today at 2, after church services. I won’t be there. I don’t really have the option to be there, but I figure it probably won’t matter to him whether I’m standing there or not. He probably wouldn’t want people to fuss, anyway.

I guess in some way it’s pretty self-serving not to be there. Like I said, I haven’t seen my grandfather in several years even though I used to write and occasionally he’d write back (he didn’t like to write – he had horrible handwriting), so really … things seem the same than when he was still alive. It’s not so final.

They will be, my mom said, “dissolving” my grandparents “estate” – their apartment. It’s still a rental, after all, even though my grandparents have lived there for several decades, and once it’s cleared out, and redone and repainted, another family will move in and live there. I suppose they’ll be giving a lot of my grandparents’ things to charity. The family will take some. I know this makes me sound like the vulture circling overhead, but I do hope my mom remembers I’ve always wanted the photo of my grandfather as a young soldier that hung in the corner of the living room.