On Monday I got the call nobody wants to get. My
grandfather died, Monday morning.
There Is No Pain, You Are Receding
Before 2017, I'd been fairly lucky. Few people I knew about had died, let alone somebody I was close to. That changed, when my uncle died.
It was a bad death. My uncle was never good at dealing with a setback, emotional or professional, and when the company he worked for laid him off, his alcoholism only got worse. By the time he died, his liver had failed so thoroughly toxins were leaking through his skin.
I cried at my desk, and on the way home, plugged in my iPod. The first song that played was Pink Floyd.
A Distant Ship Smoke On the Horizon
I've never been close with my mother's side of the family, including my mother. This has been the function mostly of the fact that my father, who mostly raised me on his own, and my mother's side have a contentious relationship at best. The one person, however, who stood behind my father was my grandfather.
Maybe it was because he was a generous man. Maybe it was because he'd gone through an ugly divorce of his own. But regardless, he stood by my father. I was always grateful for it. I wish now I'd told him more often.
You Are Only Coming Through In Waves
I'm bad at staying in touch. Facebook and the like have been a godsend for me to stay in touch with people I've befriended and people I love, simply because I'm not the kind of person who picks up the phone.
As a result, I haven't spoken to anybody in my mother's family in any meaningful way beyond the occasional email for nearly five years. I take my share of blame for this: like I said, I'm bad at staying in touch.
One thing my grandfather used to do was send newsletters. These came via snail mail, and they were the cheesiest things you ever saw: laid out on mid-'90s word processing software, but full of details from cousins and other relatives I've barely met. I never replied to those newsletters with a letter of my own. I think on some level, I thought there was always going to be time, that he was always going to be there. That, I think, is my biggest regret, that I never put pen to paper.
The Child Is Grown, the Dream Is Gone
I got the call at 6:30pm on Monday, and since then I've been engaged in the frustrating mundanities of grief. His funeral is Wednesday (I'm writing this early morning Tuesday), and my father and I will be driving twenty hours. We've been asked to attend by the widow, personally, and neither of us can afford the airfare. Nor can we afford not to be there.
My girlfriend can't come, although she wants to: we simply have too many pets. Explaining that and reassuring her she wasn't being a terrible person was the first thing I did. She packed a bag for me, while I wrote my various markets and told them what was happening.
The horrible irony of funerals and travel is that you can only grieve so much. You may want to be immovable. But you can't be. You have no choice: you have somewhere to be, and it is vitally important that you get there.
You shut off, for a little while. You feel the grief there, just under the surface, but you can't acknowledge it. You simply have to accept that for the moment, what you're feeling has to stay locked away while you find a hotel and arrange the details of a last-minute trip.
And you welcome it, in a way. To not deal with the flood all at once, but with trickles. Inevitably, the whole feeling will rush over you. But not now.
For now, you have become comfortably numb.
There Is No Pain, You Are Receding
Before 2017, I'd been fairly lucky. Few people I knew about had died, let alone somebody I was close to. That changed, when my uncle died.
It was a bad death. My uncle was never good at dealing with a setback, emotional or professional, and when the company he worked for laid him off, his alcoholism only got worse. By the time he died, his liver had failed so thoroughly toxins were leaking through his skin.
I cried at my desk, and on the way home, plugged in my iPod. The first song that played was Pink Floyd.
A Distant Ship Smoke On the Horizon
I've never been close with my mother's side of the family, including my mother. This has been the function mostly of the fact that my father, who mostly raised me on his own, and my mother's side have a contentious relationship at best. The one person, however, who stood behind my father was my grandfather.
Maybe it was because he was a generous man. Maybe it was because he'd gone through an ugly divorce of his own. But regardless, he stood by my father. I was always grateful for it. I wish now I'd told him more often.
You Are Only Coming Through In Waves
I'm bad at staying in touch. Facebook and the like have been a godsend for me to stay in touch with people I've befriended and people I love, simply because I'm not the kind of person who picks up the phone.
As a result, I haven't spoken to anybody in my mother's family in any meaningful way beyond the occasional email for nearly five years. I take my share of blame for this: like I said, I'm bad at staying in touch.
One thing my grandfather used to do was send newsletters. These came via snail mail, and they were the cheesiest things you ever saw: laid out on mid-'90s word processing software, but full of details from cousins and other relatives I've barely met. I never replied to those newsletters with a letter of my own. I think on some level, I thought there was always going to be time, that he was always going to be there. That, I think, is my biggest regret, that I never put pen to paper.
The Child Is Grown, the Dream Is Gone
I got the call at 6:30pm on Monday, and since then I've been engaged in the frustrating mundanities of grief. His funeral is Wednesday (I'm writing this early morning Tuesday), and my father and I will be driving twenty hours. We've been asked to attend by the widow, personally, and neither of us can afford the airfare. Nor can we afford not to be there.
My girlfriend can't come, although she wants to: we simply have too many pets. Explaining that and reassuring her she wasn't being a terrible person was the first thing I did. She packed a bag for me, while I wrote my various markets and told them what was happening.
The horrible irony of funerals and travel is that you can only grieve so much. You may want to be immovable. But you can't be. You have no choice: you have somewhere to be, and it is vitally important that you get there.
You shut off, for a little while. You feel the grief there, just under the surface, but you can't acknowledge it. You simply have to accept that for the moment, what you're feeling has to stay locked away while you find a hotel and arrange the details of a last-minute trip.
And you welcome it, in a way. To not deal with the flood all at once, but with trickles. Inevitably, the whole feeling will rush over you. But not now.
For now, you have become comfortably numb.
