't was the Thread: a tribute

It was 'round 2020 when I started writing about my grandfather. Cats, it is said, can feel when their death is coming. I was like a cat in this regard; only I didn't perceive my end, just someone else. My muse would sit at the table and suggest me that it was the time to write about grandpa.

To put it less romantically, there had been signs.

Now, truth to be told, I was never really close with any of my grandfathers as a kid. It was hard to relate to these giant, grizzled and bent men, who seemed to know everything and yet lacked context to understand the most basic shit, like the proper use of a GameBoy Color.

Even now, there is no logical reason why I feel a connection with my paternal grandparent. A farmer by profession, his fingers were battered, gnarled roots, the bones - having been dented or bent several times - had grown thick and arthritic. This man had barely completed third grade and could read - slowly (he liked historical fiction) - but he spent most of his time outside. In the pauses from farming he would: work as a carpenter, as an hairdresser, a butcher, help others in the community, do church work, possibly repair engines, and perform a folk-religion version of an exorcism against bad luck (for which he was famous for).

Skip a generation and his grandkid has spent most of his awake time in front of some screen, has pursued two degrees, has travelled to the other side of the world and back several times. An atheist with pianist fingers that tap on keys, who couldn't tell you what's wrong with your car, and doesn't know which fruit matures in which season. This person is lofty enough to to call himself a writer.

These people didn't have much to share with each other. It didn't help that one was very self-absorbed, and the other very reserved.

Hadn't it been for a sudden onset of senile dementia, I would have never known my grandfather. The same condition that led him to mess the bed, and skip meals, and complain about the most inane shit making his primary caregivers tense as a violin cord had the curious side effect of making him talkative in a way he had never been.

And it wasn't even about the same stories, like when a communist stole his bike on a Sunday morning or how he managed to avoid the fascist levy by several strokes of ingenuity and sheer luck. I knew those stories already, I cherished them. No, it was the stupid, commonplace things, like how he used to drive up until there, how his brothers were so and so.

And he would smile. This man - who appeared in any picture with the serious grimace of a model from a bygone era - would smile profusely. Suddenly the man wasn't so granitic anymore. I sensed weakness. I sensed his personality collapsing and I dove in, grasping at straws.

Even when he worsened, even when he stank and started to lay in bed motionless, waiting for death to come, even then - this man would try to stand when I came visiting.

I have no delusion. The illness didn't get away as I approached him. Still, he would stand, and he would talk to me.

My grandfather was also my godfather - a factoid he liked to remind me of, and whose cultural significance is lost on me. Moreover, the folk-magic semi-exorcism he used to perform apparently skips a generation; in theory, I was in line to inherit it. There was a thread there, call it fate, call it culture, call it genetics: the same head shape, the same hairline, and who knows, maybe even some overlap on brain patterns. There was a thread there.

It scared me a bit. And it makes me think that people talk about dying in your own bed, without knowing that's only half the story, that sometimes the bed lasts months and it reeks of piss. I've seen it happen time and time again now. That not-so-gentle stretch of time.

When, seemingly on a whim, my grandpa decided to gift me his golden ring I was taken aback. By all accounts, the ring was ugly. Is. It's sitting on my desk right now: bulky, it's design screaming 70s, with his initials. Nowadays not even mafia members would wear that kind of bling.

I asked why and the answer was the usual refrain: he was not gonna need it where he was going.

If there's a version of christian-inspired gallows humor, that was my grandfather's late specialty. He was like, "Well, one of these days I'm gonna go up", or, "the guy up there's gonna finally take a decision". Heaven. He meant heaven, or then again he had reached the point that I've seen some people reach, where all that was good is behind you, and all that as new is just the same old but with more pain.

So if one morning you stop waking up, well, that's Heaven already.

It was 'round 2020 when I started writing about my grandfather. I did so in indirect ways, as fiction writers are prone to do. An horror short story, the shadow of crow peak, (where a goat farmer inherits a dark ritual to appease an unnamed mountain deity) clumsily put this feeling of generational connection in words. I've been telling other versions of that story for four years now.

Eventually the guy upstairs did make a move, after several months passed playing dead on a double size bed, a nasty fall against a glass door, and a short stint with COVID. This was more than a year ago.

My father, called impromptu by the south american pastor to give a eulogy, stumbled near the closed coffin (after the hospital stay, my grandfather face was bloated and bloody, they say), opened yet another window on the man.

He said grandpa was always learning, doing, refining, helping. He said he had never seen him idle, or complacent; he said he was a good man and a builder. The thread had been coiling around my wrist by now and I could feel the pull.

I wasn't much affected by grief. I have yet to face grief in its purest, personal form; so far, all my encounters with the dead have been characterized by reflections - an understanding about how other people do it, a knowing of should and ought to.

And yet, we're here. I love that fucking ugly gold ring. I love that I had it. I asked my father if it was ok to keep it, and he said, of course, he wanted you to have it.

And now sometimes it rains, and sometimes it doesn't rain, and I remember how even when he was too sick to work, grandpa would worry about the fields and the trees.

So, here's to it. I'll still write stories about the thread, because that's what I do. I see connections everywhere now, for good and for worse.