Upon the death of a patriarch

I apologize for the topic of this post. It is such a struggle to decide what to say publicly when someone dies. I think that the way it “ought” to be dealt with is something that many people have strong feelings about, and yet there is no consensus. So in a selfish attempt to sort through my own head after the death of my Grandfather, on this the day we laid him to rest, I am making my thoughts public. I promise this won't be too sad, more a reflection; death is inevitable and dying at nearly ninety is something of an accomplishment. Not that we won't miss him, but there is much more to be celebrated than mourned. 

 My Grandfather was not an easy man: raised in depression, served in the Navy and worked on the railroad, he had gained the requisite tough exterior. I did not have an easy relationship with him as a young girl; I was eventually able to hold my own, but there were years I lived in terror of his acerbic tongue. To this day I think I have spilled more tears over his short temper and impatience than any other man or boy. Eventually I came to understand that he had his own burdens, that he loved us but didn't express it well. That, for most of my life he was either dealing with being the caregiver for my grandmother as she suffered from a terminal illness, or mourning her loss, was a difficult realization that shed some light on his temper. As I grew up I came to appreciate that he was stubborn, not only in his demands but also his love for family.

 I also came to view and appreciate my grandfather’s quiet streak of feminism. I don’t imagine that is a word that he would have been very comfortable using, and he certainly wasn’t radically progressive in the area, but it was pretty clear that he viewed my grandmother as a partner and that they raised their sons and daughter to raise strong women of their own. He was nonchalant about voting for a woman or going to female doctors. He was raised by a single mother after his father passed away, and I am sure watching that strength of will had a great influence on him. He never batted an eye when I decided to work on the hill or go to law school, and he was an equal opportunity interrupter.

 In his last days he asked for us all to come see him. He could be demanding, and we wondered if he was feeling bored, but, when we arrived, it was clear he was saying goodbye, taking his last moments to enjoy us all together. He had been sick for some time, and while we had joked that he was stubborn enough to live forever, I had accepted that his time was near. His last question to me was whether anyone actually read the books in our law library, which I could answer honestly that they did. I’ll think of that question any time I pull a reporter from the shelf, a small carried forward " I love you".

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” 

—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

My Grandfather had lost his front teeth to a horseshoe as a young man,
when my cousin and I lost our front teeth at the same time he tool the
opportunity to show off his inner first-grader.