Remembering my Gramps

Originally published Nov. 27, 2017

A year ago, and a month before his 80th birthday, my grandfather — Gramps — fell down the stairs and died.

I had just washed my face and was fussing about a large pimple in between my eyebrows when we got a call from my Nana that she was trying to resuscitate him. My dad answered the phone — which was surprising in and of itself because we never answered the landline — and we couldn’t have been less prepared for the shock that followed.

But he started up the car and my mom dialed each of her three brothers on her cell to tell them what was going on: what we hoped was not.

As my dad drove, he told me Gramps' heart was still beating. However, my own heart pulsed fast enough to warn that there was not much time left.

When we arrived at the hospital, chill air and blue lights surrounded us. And at first, I worried that it would take us too long to find his room. But we were the only people there, and the nurses were quick to direct us to a waiting room with my Nana.

Sitting there, I watched for the first time as my Nana sobbed. She never sobbed. But we all sobbed — I, my uncle, my mom and dad, and brother — out of fear and love for my Gramps.<p>Gramps was still living when they brought us in to see him, but it was clear that he wasn’t really there. With a puffy face and swollen black eye, his neck in a brace and his body covered in blankets, I recognized him only by his hands and arms – the same calloused, leathery palms I had seen gripping a glass of wine two nights before at the Thanksgiving table.

I tried to be thankful for it all — to see the beauty in the fact that his eye was bruised now in the exact place it had been when my Nana first fell in love with him. I tried to feel blessed that I was able to live under his roof that spring, during my own time in the hospital. I tried to feel fulfilled having since learned his favorite TV shows and political opinions; to feel proud that he had lived such a life of accomplishment from hitchhiking to Germany at the age of 19 — my age — to raising four children and 11 grandchildren all before his 80th birthday.

And I did, I felt all those things, but I also felt very, very, sad.<p>

So with my brother beside me, I watched my Gramps' heart rate drop lower and lower until it was nothing at all.<p>

We slept at Nana’s that night, all of us, but no one really slept. And, when I returned to college a day later, I couldn’t sleep either. I left my dorm at midnight and walked around campus in my pajamas and flip-flops, unphased by the questioning glances from security guards.

Death isn’t easy to heal from, because it can’t be reversed, and he can’t come back. Similarly, his memory can never leave us, either. Gramps is impossible to forget.