When Time is Irrelevant

It seemed so cruel for him to die on such a beautiful blue day. My heart would have been more at ease had the clouds gathered in a fit of gray anger and roared out rain. I prayed, not for my grandfather to die in peace, but for a terrible storm. If veins of lightning ripped across the sky, I might have had something to distract me from knowing this was the last time I would lay mortal eyes on my grandfather.

As I sat next to his bed watching his soul fade, a mix of everything I’ve ever felt in life swooshed around inside of me like damp laundry in a dryer. I couldn’t separate love, from hate, from joy, from fear, from anger, from hope, from despair. Even though my strongest memories with my grandfather were things of humiliation and frustration, I knew I would miss him for the rest of my life. I would lament never being able to re-write any chapters that were full of lived mistakes.

I reached for his hand. It was leathered, translucent, paper-thin, and cold. Death had made its presence known even though his heart still weakly beat on an EKG, and I recited his favorite poem. It was about women. How this old man married four women and could marry, again, four more if given the opportunity was an anomaly to me. The thought reminded me of Nikolai Tesla’s celibacy and how much time people waste chasing sex.

I’d never get to ask him those uncomfortable questions about why he liked boxing matches more than two men holding a deep conversation, or why he left my grandmother with two kids to fend for themselves while he galavanted in a new society far away from the cracked hearts he left behind.

I hated my grandfather for many years, but as I saw his yellowing body, and heard his voice leave his body, I couldn’t help but be softened by the exiting of a human from this planet. How fragile our ideas of life are. That we take everything for granted. That we think we will live to bitch again about trivialities tomorrow and the day after that.

“I wish I had been nicer to your grandmother,” he whispered.

I wanted to laugh because I knew that would be his last regret. I kept my mouth shut because somebody might hear me and think me mad. Instead, I wondered what my last remorse in life would be: not telling my friends how much I loved them, no. Not traveling the world, no. Ignoring the homeless, no. Not taking responsibility for every microscopic thing I do, no. Those were things I always kept at the forefront of my mind every day that I lived. I think my greatest regret would have been not writing these moments down. Not for preserving the memory of my grandfather, but for the sake of pulling up somebody from a pit of hell they were about to fall in had they not come across somebody else’s painful testimony of life.

Death is a force of nature so few of us are prepared for. We don’t respect it for what it is. It is something that erases the world you once knew. It is something that wipes away the people you love from sight. It is the unstoppable force that forever changes future Christmas morning for the rest of your life.

No more grandpa to sing Nat King Cole songs with. No more weird casseroles that he would encourage me to eat –even though I can’t stomach beef. No more sand to dust out of his shoes when he came back home from digging for clams on the beach.

I stood over him and wanted to die with him. I dreaded them coming in and taking his body away and living years later to wonder if my grandfather was even real because I hadn’t seen him in decades.

He died an hour later, and my mouth and mind were a dry desert for words. There was nothing to say or think because the loss had been more than my heart could bear. It’s been years since he left, but it feels like it was only yesterday that he walked out the front door, and I’m still waiting for him to come back.

Today, I write this story from his favorite chair in the house he left my mother. The fog has rolled in, and the gongs of the wind chimes outside are nostalgic enough to make me think he is in the kitchen, cutting up raspberry glazed donuts like he used to almost every summer morning. I smell the salt in the air and give him a memorial high-five for choosing such a lush part of the world to live in.

I’m still not a fan of the grim reaper coming to collect his fee, but I am at peace knowing life and death are as natural as night and day. You cannot have one without the other. I’m also reminded that everything, be it a dance, a movie, senior year at college, comes to an end. It is best to accept that as early as possible. It is the way of the Universe, and its purpose is to keep us humble.

Despite philosophies, whatever dust you have returned to and wherever your cosmic energy spread, I miss you, Grandpa, still.