To Openly Acknowledge

 I should have paid more attention. After quite a bit of soul searching, I’ve decided not to feel overwhelmingly guilty about this; as most of us do not pay close attention to something or another. Nevertheless, I now know I should have paid attention. I did not know him as well as I could have; should have. What I do know is this:

My grandfather was raised by a man that was, by all accounts, one of the kindest, most empathetic souls that existed. I have to rely on stories of his altruism, as I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my mother, his granddaughter, was a child. I’ve been told this man often gave medicines to the poorest of the poor for whatever they may have to give, and when that something was, in fact, nothing, he gave them medicines for free. I know that often the folks in the small Michigan town used him as their physician as well as their pharmacist. I know that he loved children immensely, especially his own children.

On the other hand, my grandfather was raised by a woman who was, by all accounts, an overpowering, controlling human being. Again, my experience does not inform this picture of her—she died when my mother was a teenager. The stories of her existence that have made their way down to me revolve around her constantly forcing her parenting views on others and he ability to always overstay her welcome. That being said, my grandfather never had a bad thing to say about his mother.

I don’t know why my grandfather did not aspire to be a pharmacist and business owner like his father before him; but he didn’t. Like many others who followed right on the cusp of the Greatest Generation, he chose to join the armed forces right after graduating high school in 1951; he wanted to travel the world, and showed certain aptitudes, and therefore, was enlisted in the Naval Training program as a midshipman and officer in training and given a four year Naval scholarship for college in New Mexico. When he wasn’t in school he was on a Navy ship. His Navy dreams died in the final semester of his schooling: in a flag football game organized by his fraternity brothers he was tackled. That tackle broke his back. Surgeries and halos and braces followed. He was unable to finish the term and he was honorably discharged from his training. Sadly, this meant his was not eligible for any Navy benefits, but they paid his medical bills and for his transport home, likely out of the goodness of their hearts.

The one thing I can say is, despite his disappointment in not being able to follow his dreams of a Navy career, he never played the “what if…” game. I asked him more than once what he thought his life would be like if he’d had the chance to serve in the Navy and travel the world as extensively as he hoped. Each time, he looked at me blankly—not understanding why anyone would ask that question, since that was not the way his life had transpired. He accepted what had happened to him and moved on.

After a year at home recuperating, what we do know is that he finished his teaching certification at a small teaching college in Michigan. I don’t know that he really wanted to be a teacher. I know that he enjoyed sports. I know that he enjoyed history. Perhaps this was the second-best option for him—being able to be a coach and high school teacher for 43 years. I know that, even if he didn’t enjoy teaching as much as he would have enjoyed other endeavors, he threw himself into his work. This was another thing he taught me—even when you’re frustrated with the system, the students, or the curriculum—throw yourself into the work. Find a way around barriers. Do not take no as an answer.

He met my grandmother at the wedding of her cousin and his best friend. From what I can tell, he’d had many other girlfriends, whereas my grandmother was called an old maid by the folks in the small town where she had lived almost her entire life. Her family had been poor; she herself had been born in a chicken shack. Her family and friends had mocked her for not accepting the proposal of the townsman who wanted to start a strawberry farm. They didn’t understand why she had worked so hard for two years in order to escape farm life and small town politics to go to college. And perhaps they didn’t understand why, when her father came down seriously ill and had to retire from farming and working at the lime kiln, she came back home to work again in order to help support the family.

What I do know, from my grandmother’s own words, is that my grandfather picked her out of the crowd—an anxious, mousy, painfully shy country girl—highly aware of her fears and insecurities and poverty-- and in the end married her. I can’t say that they always loved one another. I know they fought when my mother was a child. I know there was a significant period of time in my mom’s teenage years where my grandmother was hospitalized for a ‘nervous breakdown’ and my grandfather had run off to California. The speculation abounds, but consistently revolves around another woman or a drug addiction. Perhaps it was a little of both. My mother lived with her aunt off and on during her high school years—that normalcy was good for her—while my grandparents each worked out their issues; at first, apart, and then together. This is another lesson he taught me; you can go home again. It may not be the same, but you can go home.

My grandfather had a hell of a time staying still. It was obvious he wanted to travel since he was young, and I think the wanderlust was constantly nipping at his heels. He always wanted to move to the next thing, find the greener pasture, and accept the next challenge. This left my grandparents without an owned home, an adequate retirement, and bitterness between them—as my grandmother was much more of a homebody then he was. In my younger adulthood this bothered me to no end. Of course, in one’s first years out on their own, they are often living on the edge of existence, and only seek to feel secure and/or established. As I’ve gotten older I’ve felt the same pull of wanderlust, of the need to see new and exotic things, to write of my own explorations. I credit my grandfather for this pull—whether hereditary or taught—as this trait has helped me time and again to overcome my own tendencies of being risk-averse, and accept a new challenge that has, in the end, been the most beneficial thing for me.

I don’t know that my grandfather loved his family in the way Hollywood teaches us to expect love. I don’t know that any of us do, or even should, try to live up to that fantasy. His generation wasn’t one to fully embrace the self-esteem-building, hugging, embodiment of Dr. Spock, but I do know he tried, in his own way. I think he loved my mother significantly. I do think he loved me less, for my personality’s traits he did not understand and for my personal choices that he did not understand. He did want me to be successful, however, and he had specific plans for how that success would take shape, and he wasn’t afraid to contact my teachers in high school and prescribe to them how he expected me to be taught. He once cornered my English teacher at a school sporting event and told him to stop fostering a love in writing in me; the real jobs and money would be in computers. Given that this predated the dot.com boom; I now appreciate his ability to ascertain future trends, if not his meddling itself.

He tried to foster an appreciation in sports and history in my children; sadly that’s not exactly where their interests lie. My older son has an artist’s soul; he adores everything music and literature and writing and art. My younger son will likely be the one who cures cancer; he’s a fearless soul infatuated with science and math and has no qualms about medicine and how the body works. My grandfather’s endeavor fell on deaf ears, but  the he taught me lessons from this are twofold; that everyone needs to understand our collective human history as well as current social condition, and that to truly understand a person’s interests, strengths, and weaknesses is to be able to truly help them actualize their full potential.

Towards the end of his life, I did not see him as much as I should have. Here I am, caring for a husband and two children and a household and a fulltime job. He was trying to tell me that he was sick, that he was dying (as we are all dying), that he was hurting, and because this presented itself as an addiction to surgery, I bucked and fought against what he was really trying to tell me. It seemed uncanny; his surgeries were always scheduled for significant dates in my life—the day I supposed to present my practicum project in my capstone project for graduation from my bachelor’s degree was heart surgery, my commencement date for graduate school was a knee replacement, my wedding anniversary was shoulder reconstruction, etc. I thought he was aging disgracefully; trying to remain forever young. I thought it was his refusal to accept that the body starts to break down as we get older. It was ineffective communication on both our parts, and this has taught me that I need to be open and honest—with myself and my husband, my children and their children—about my health and what I am feeling. I will not be passive aggressive and seek attention for my health without telling people what is really going on.

In the end, in the last two months of his life, where he was confined to a hospice bed as the cancer encroached upward each and every day, we reached some semblance of closure. I was down there more often than I was at home-- caring for him, learning everything I could about his care from those angels who masquerade around as hospice nurses, sitting with him and counting his breaths and watching the ventricular tachycardia on the monitor and making sure he received the morphine each and every time he began to grimace. I rubbed his mottled skin with lotion and learned how to wash out his mouth in order to keep the skin within it from dying and peeling off and choking him. I learned how to roll him and flex his legs—even though it caused him pain and the breakdown of his skin and the tightening of his tendons was a battle I was just going to lose. Sometimes he was awake and lucid—and while unable to speak much, I would note the recognition in his face and I took comfort in the fact that he seemed legitimately happy to see I was there to care for him. Sometimes, when he was able to take water or food, he would be strong enough to hold my hand for a few brief moments or sometimes even blow me a kiss. I appreciate the fact that he gave me this closure, and I would tell him every day that we were all okay, that I was here to take care of everything, that he needn’t worry—because I would take care of it all. His last whispered words to me were instructions; he needed to know that I would make sure my grandmother took her medication and stopped standing on chairs to dust the ceiling fans. His very last word on this Earth, in the second before his last breath, when his eyes opened wide and the look of surprise overtook his face, was “Oh!”

I was raised to be a good girl in a town that considered itself Southern, and what I’ve written here is pretty much considered sacrilege. A traditional obituary lists achievements and loved ones in a manner that reminds me of some great competition or race to rack up achievements in the time we have. We never mention how imperfect our loved ones are; to speak ill of the dead? Well, I’m certain you’ve heard the cliché. And yet, those imperfections—those missteps and mistakes—that’s the important stuff, right there. That’s where we learn and grow. That is the space in which we act and interact each and every day. The way my grandfather handled challenges and changed trajectories and mistakes and imperfections is what has taught me to be a better person, a better teacher, a better parent. Sometimes these examples were demonstrative of how one should act and sometimes those examples demonstrated how one should not act. It pains me that it’s deemed unacceptable to speak of our lives this way. I feel as if it only presents part of the picture. We are not perfect. We are human, and we struggle. My grandfather was human, and he struggled, and sometimes he won and sometimes he lost, and that’s just the way it is. This is what I wish we could openly acknowledge; that everyone would acknowledge about each and every one of us.