by mahi-mahi » Fri Sep 18, 2015 4:21 pm
Terms
My grandpa died last winter. The way the news came to my family was a phone call, and then to me by my little brother. I was in my underwear, wondering if I was going to my friends New Year party this year, or working.
Wait... (Italics) my grandpa? Dead?
I was never very close to my grandpa, but I always remembered him as a very traditional man who worked very hard and drank even harder. The cause of death, officially, was lived failure.
(Italics) a memory
It was Thanksgiving Break and my parents were in Mexico to visit family and routine doctor visits that my father was too stubborn to do here. My aunt was with us for the same purpose, and we were in a kind of boredom, the kind that seeps through and could kill you, if not careful. For one reason or another, everybody but me went to my Dad's restaurant and I didn't want to go. It was there that my grandpa called and said his words. Words I never heard.
While I didn't know that that was "The Last Time", the aftermath wasn't surprising. We had known Grandpa was in bad shape, and try as we might, we knew it was nearly his time.
What pissed me off was that something as important and ultimately mundane could occur in an everyday situation: people order dessert, have a lovely lunch, make money, speak their last words to their loved ones, etc.
A week later, I was in a store buying a funeral suit. It all seemed so surreal: why me? Why now? What I now understand is I refused to come to terms with my Grief and thought I could by being a rock, a role that I wasn't sure I could do. It tore me up even more to see my poor, beautiful mothers reaction. She was a very strong, stoic women who, when the doctors told her to just give up on her triplets, to abort them and forget the fact she had stayed in Virginia Beach General for a few months and move on, she adamantly refused. (Italics) she was going to have those kids, on her terms. I maybe saw her cry 5 or 4 times in my entire time with her. In the ensuing 2 weeks? 3 or 4 times. It broke me to see her like that, so fragile in the face of a fact of life. But what could I even say to someone going through that? To this day, I still don't know.
When we finally reached my grandpa's funeral home/morgue, the crying continued. Everybody could, but I couldn't. I simply Walked that fine line between comforting others and thinking "Am I a robot?"
That night, I realized something important. I liked it. After many years of hating life and being a wanderer, it occurred to me that while life is a cycle, I liked it, as a whole. I liked the cool winter air hitting my hotel room. I liked the dogs barking and I liked seeing the stars, and the endless void looking back at me that I would someday occupy. While I am against the idea of heaven and all, I thought how cool would that be?
(Italics) a memory.
It is Christmas, the year, I don't know. It was a while ago, and my family had gotten together at my grandpa's house. We were having a good time: singing Vicente Fernandez and eating good lomo and ponche. My grandpa, called out to me as I was going upstairs to sleep.
"Mijo, te quiero mucho"
The men in my family have a habit of saying a lot of things they don't or do mean, and I assumed this was one of those times.
I wish I hadn't.
I discovered that while we can't escape death, we can fill life with moments that take that pain away, on our terms.
