I can still remember the way he said my name. The way he smelled, a mix of salt and saliva, and the way he had to shuffle slowly when he walked. Even his raspy laugh still holds some sort of residence in my memory. At 89 years old, he was the first grandparent of mine to pass away. Prior to that morning, the only deaths in my life had been those of people I’d never met. I suppose I was lucky in that sense.
It was never the case that we were extremely close as that’s not the relationship I have with many family members, whether immediate or external. We’re spread out across the country and usually keep to ourselves. Grandpop lived in New Jersey, so whether it was morning or afternoon when he died I don’t know. I’m not sure if that detail matters.
Deep down I know that the last memory I have of him is standing in a parking lot, piss leaving a mark on his sweatpants, bitterly cursing as he hadn’t remembered my mom and I were leaving town the next day. I stood there quietly not knowing what to say. What followed was a tension filled goodbye and my naive twelve year old self felt an internal annoyance at his rage and the fact I would have to sit next to him and his soiled pants in the car.
What I consider my last memory occurred months earlier, maybe longer. In a car ride to the shore one afternoon the two of us sat in the backseat looking out our respective windows. Gas stations and strip malls turned to expanding greenery and trees as the scenery went from urban to rural. Maybe he saw me looking up at the sky, or maybe he had been looking up at it himself, but he turned to me commenting on how beautiful, clear, and blue it was that day. “And it’s the same anywhere you go. It’s the same sky.” The day I learned he died, his words were a broken record in my mind. “The same sky.” But all day it was cold, grey, and cloudy.
Just thirteen days before my thirteenth birthday I was woken up by my father’s voice telling me, “Lauren, Grandpop passed away.” Immediately I snapped out of the half asleep state I was in but got no reply when I asked, “Wait, what?” I shouldn’t have felt surprised as he’d already been in the hospital. Perhaps for only a few weeks, but how is someone supposed to feel when that’s their alarm clock?
I know he would’ve liked to die sooner. My paternal grandmother always says, “It’s hell to get old,” and that was his whole hearted belief. A “man’s man” and painter by trade, it wore him down emotionally to lose his independence and need help with simple everyday tasks. With that thought raging in his mind, alcohol was one of the main causes of his death.
His funeral was exactly a week before my birthday and the first I’d ever been to. I felt out of place in the very small chapel with hot pink mixed into my black dress. Wasn’t I supposed to be in all black? I sat politely as a recording of “Taps” played, since he’d served in World War II, while soldiers in their dress blues brought out a flag. His ashes were in a gold colored box on the alter in the front of the room with a picture of him on either side of it. The whole ceremony took at most fifteen or twenty minutes. Short and simple. The way he would’ve wanted it. Had he attended he would’ve complained, very loudly as he was hard of hearing, that it was too long.
The cry my Grandmom made outside the chapel after the ceremony, “I don’t want him in a box, I want him here,” haunts me more than any detail of that day. Sometimes when it pops into my head I hear it in her heartbroken voice, and other times it’s my own. I cry easily when reading books and watching movies or tv shows, but never when it comes to actual death. Perhaps it sounds harsh, though the thought or reality of death has never phased me. It’s a fate I’ve accepted. Still, I expected to cry like everyone around me. I expected to be overwhelmed with grief. I expected so much more than a single tear slowly trailing down one of my cheeks as “Taps” played one final time while an American flag was folded as the extent of my mourning. At least the sky was beautiful, clear, and blue.
