Remembering my Grandpa

My Grandpa likes to tell the story about the ice cream stand. It’s a short one, and easy to follow, so I’ll summarize it now.

The ice cream stand was stationed at Crystal Beach — a glorified sand strip off the Bohemian section of the Delaware River. Grandpa used to drive us there in his motorboat, back when he had two working lungs and before the skin cancer prohibited him from spending time in the sun.

Grandma would anchor the boat, my twin brother and I would canon-ball into the water, and the four of us would ride the tide to shore.

We followed the same routine multiple times a summer, probably most frequently in the early 2000s, and we became familiar with the employees who operated the stand. What’s more, we became familiar with their scooping methodology.

The boy — we never learned his name so always referred to him as ‘the boy’ — shoveled copious amounts of ice cream onto our cones, whereas 'the girl' — also nameless — spooned conservatively.

Grandpa always laughed when reaching his favorite part of the story. The part where I, disappointed by too many too small cones, walked straight up to the stand and demanded: "I want the boy," he used to recall. Then he would pause.“My granddaughter loves big servings of ice cream."

He told the story often: in the summertime, at family gatherings, and long after I had sworn off sugar and fat entirely.

“My granddaughter loves big servings of ice cream,” he'd repeat with a smile.

In 2012, on the same day I was admitted to my first inpatient facility for anorexia, Grandpa underwent transplant surgery for a new lung. I was 15 and he was 73.

Things changed.

To lose weight for the surgery, he reduced his calorie intake; limited his ice cream.

After, his doctors prescribed him numerous medications — his daily pillbox looked like a Rubik's cube — paired with multiple side effects.

He stopped driving the boat, which they later sold, and neither of us consumed ice cream. Our shared memories became just that, memories, and our points of connection became sparse.

In the years that followed, Grandpa’s health became a hot topic at the family dinner table.

“Was his new lung facing rejection?” “Should he really be spending so much time in Florida considering the state of his skin?” “What about his blood sugar?”

My disease, meanwhile, sat in silence — hidden behind an untouched spoon, which deafly whispered that I was in danger, too.

Still, as both our sicknesses endured, Grandpa continued repeating the ice cream story. I wondered if he thought he could will me to eat again, or was simply numb to my reality.

It was in 2018, when I visited Grandma and Grandpa for my junior year Spring Break, when Grandpa first looked me in the face and told me he was learning about anorexia — and learning about me.

I had published a personal essay in the college newspaper, The Temple News, shortly before my visit, and had brought it with me for him to read. He did.

“I didn’t know you were that sick,” Grandpa told me — after mentioning the story would be better with the Oxford comma — “I knew some of it, but I wasn’t there."

And he hadn’t been.

When I was admitted to my final inpatient stay in 2016, Grandma and Grandpa had already left for Florida.

They went down in the fall and returned in late spring or summer, meaning we no longer saw them in person for things like Thanksgiving and Christmas, unless they made a spontaneous trip. They had sent me flowers as I wiggled in and out of various facilities, but they didn't see me, my shrunken frame, or internal struggle I felt while eating ice cream in the hospital cafeteria. They were unaware of the extent of my fear of sugars and fats, or the extent to which I had stripped the two substances from my body.

But suddenly, he was trying to understand. We ate ice cream together each night of my stay.

“My granddaughter loves big servings of ice cream,” Grandpa repeated later that night, as we ate two scoops in front of the TV. “Just like me.”

The last time I saw Grandpa alive was in February 2020, when I visited him again, for my senior spring break.

On the trip, we didn't talk about the ice cream story. It was almost as if our past conversations had shifted our relationship to allow for us to talk about new things; make new memories. So we discussed politics, watched Black and White movies, and took walks around a little alligator-filled lagoon.

Grandpa passed away last night, on Dec. 1, 2020. And I miss him a lot.