Grandpa
In the last week, I’ve figured out something that’s taken me 8 years to actually realize: I miss my grandpa. It’s a peculiar thing to realize that, for the longest time, somewhere inside, you knew you missed him, but when you first lost him, you didn’t entirely grasp what you’d lost.
The revelation came to me this last week, when Jenn was talking about being sick and said something about it possibly being pneumonia, but she wasn’t going to go see a doctor about it. I proceeded to irrationally flip out about it to a slightly more than normal extent (to the point where I was actually feeling angry). I apologized when I realized I’d been flipping out, but I wasn’t sure what caused me to do that (as I’d been in a perfectly fine mood moments earlier). Then later on, she talked about one of her roommates having heart surgery, which also caused me to freak out, again with no real reason. I apologized again, and this time my head connected the dots as to why I’d done so: They both, in conjunction with everything else in my life, made me remember grandpa.
I was a freshman in high school at the time, and I remember the day my mom and dad pulled my sister and I out of English class to take us to see him. He’d had a heart attack months earlier, but had been fine after surgery, but he had developed a cough. The doctors wrote it off as part of the recovery and didn’t think anything of it until he showed up in the emergency room with the cough still and a fever. Turns out they were putting the “practice” into the practice of medicine and didn’t stop to think that it might be pneumonia. We spent a few days in the hospital before our cousin drove us home to be with our dad and just a short time before my 15th birthday, my grandpa passed away.
To this day, I think that’s what I most attribute my fear of hospitals to, as well as my inherent distrust for the medical profession. I remember those nights, laying on the bed on the other side of the room, watching my grandfather suffer because of some fool’s negligence to not be thorough in his diagnosis. I remember my sister coming into the room and asking grandpa if he knew Jesus, with tears in her eyes. I hated it, even at such a young age there’s no real words to describe the feeling you get watching a loved one suffer. To this day, I associate those memories with my grandfather’s death, which makes me suspicious of any doctors and hospitals.
Regardless, those two incidents triggered me coming to a couple of realizations.
My grandfather, after God, was the stable element in my not-so-stable family.
In thinking back on life, in general it seemed a lot more stable before my grandfather passed. My grandmother had her soulmate, my mother had her daddy, my sister and I had our grandfather. Up through freshman year, I’d have actually considered my life to be generally “normal”, if one can define normal.
My grandfather was an amazing man. He could mediate between my mother and grandmother; they love each other, but I think living together they can get on each other’s nerves. My sister respected his opinions (she was grandpa’s only granddaughter, after all), and I felt I had a role model, someone to whose quiet greatness I could one day aspire. He provided a quiet strength in times of need, someone to look to when you needed help.
After his death, whether I realized it or not, something changed. I became the stable element, being the oldest male closely involved with my family. Were he down here, I’m sure that element would probably be my uncle instead, but with him living in Alaska away from the rest of the family, you guessed it, I’m next in line.
Was I ready for it? Hardly.
Am I more ready for it now that I’m older? I wish.
I don’t think I realized it fell to me until I hit college, though. Three years passed before I started to notice, and considering how I tended to be emotionally at that point in my life, that’s not a good thing. Where my grandfather was confident and focused, I was lost and confused in the maze of college life, trying to sort out what I wanted to spend my life doing while searching for that certain someone to spend the rest of my life with. College was the first time I realized that there were breeds of the female species that actually had taken interest in me (took one of them asking me out for that one to hit me), and I was also blindsided by the fact that, despite knowing what I wanted to do when I left high school, I had no idea what I actually wanted to do (after finding that journalists are all liberal whack-jobs who slyly insert their opinions into what’s supposed to be an unbiased commentary).
Well, this all has come to a head in the last year. My sister got engaged a month after she started dating a guy that just about everyone around her knew wasn’t right for her, my mother, unemployed, continues to go through vocational rehab, and her being unemployed is driving my grandmother crazy (which, in turn, drives my mother crazy), and in the last week or so, my sister got married without really consulting anyone other than the pastor or my mother, both of who disagreed with her and she took everyone else’s lack of commenting as approval (had she asked anyone other than my mother or the pastor, she would’ve found out that a lot of people didn’t approve, but, as they say, unsolicited advice is criticism…).
I recounted all of this to Jenn, and said that my sister’s getting married just made me think more about my grandpa. Jenn pointed out that when I got married, I’d probably be thinking about him too, and I lost it as I said “Yeah, but the difference is when I get married, it will be ‘I wish grandpa could be here to see this,’ and with my sister it’s been ‘I’m glad grandpa doesn’t get to see this,’ even though I know he’s watching from heaven.”
It was at this point that I broke down, completely. It was the almost crushing realization that I not only had inherited grandpa’s position as family stability, but that in my own opinion, I was doing a lousy job of it. I can keep tensions between my grandma and mom to a minimum when I’m around, but that’s not nearly often enough. My sister, who respected my grandfather’s opinions, doesn’t care about mine, essentially throwing in my face the promise she made when she got engaged that she wouldn’t go to a justice of the peace and not even telling me when she actually got married, I had to find out through the grapevine. I provided the stable element when my mother needed a shoulder to cry on, but that’s about all the stability I felt I could offer. I felt like a complete failure, like in a sense I’d let grandpa down. It’s silly, really, I know I’m not to blame for all of my family’s issues, but I still feel like, if grandpa was still here, he could’ve held it all together instead of watching the whole thing blow apart.
My grandfather worked construction, certainly a manlier profession than my chosen career of retail in most respects (though I challenge any construction worker to try and remember every item in a 45 page catalog’s sale price and location in a 3500 square foot store). My grandfather was gifted with his hands in woodworking; I am not (though I hope to be one day). But most of all, my grandfather was a man of God, and I think that’s what made him the stable point of our family. All of my life, I’ve tried my best to be like him without realizing why I did. Now I think I finally know.
I just wanted Grandpa to be proud of me. I wish he were here now, to see what kind of man I’ve become, even though I’m not yet finished at becoming a man. I’ve grown up, but even I can recognize that I lack some of the maturity that separates the boy and the man. I’m still learning what my role in life is, and it’s a daily journey that’s guided by God, but I still wish grandpa were still here.
I just wish that I knew grandpa was proud of me.