My grandfather isn’t dead yet, but when he does die I might not know about it. So I’m grieving him early.
He has essentially disappeared from my life (his choice), and after a recent and emotional family reunion, I feel the need to eulogize him.
Death is an interesting thing. It immortalizes those who die young, and it releases the living to be generous with those who die old. After all, people stop disappointing you when they’re dead. It’s easy to be generous.
Beginnings are important, but they don’t live on in people’s memories. Endings do, ironically. And my grandfather didn’t end well. In fact, he isolated himself entirely from his family, he concocted false versions of events in order to justify his irrational actions, and he succumbed to a woman who utterly controlled him to his and all of our detriment.
Yet, I want to say that my grandfather was a good man. He was a simple man; his routine consisted of watching the Yankees play ball, walking the dog, completing crossword puzzles, and golfing. I remember him as one who spent his retirement years working at the local parish food pantry. Whenever I visited as a kid I’d help him bag food and hand it out to people. He possessed good comedic timing and a jolly laugh. He taught me a dance he learned when he was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. He told me stories of how he knew Grandma was the one the moment he started dancing with her. But that’s how I knew him as a child.
Becoming an adult is disappointing in that you find out all sorts of things about your relatives that you never knew. They cease to be larger than life and shrink down to regular, dysfunctional size. Family skeletons start making appearances, and middle-aged adult children start confronting what actually happened when they were kids. They begin putting words to their father’s violent outbursts, the verbal aggression, the emotional distance. Unpretty things surface when you start to dig.
After Grandma died seven years ago, Grandpa opened up emotionally in a way we’d never seen before. But then he met a woman who carries her own baggage so large, there was no longer any room for us. Now my memories are of when he lied to me about having plans to spend Thanksgiving elsewhere the time my father and I flew in from overseas to spend the holiday with him and our family. Or when we met briefly at my great-aunt’s funeral and he told me he’d join us at the family restaurant after the wake. He never showed. Never mind that he has so few opportunities to see his only granddaughter because she lives on a different continent. And those are the least offensive things he did to a member of his family. My brother, aunt, uncle, father and cousin were all treated with less consideration.
So instead of dedicating this eulogy to him, I’ll dedicate it to his children - three of the most emotionally courageous people I know. My aunt, who never felt her father’s love and bore the brunt of his emotional violence all her life, yet isn’t bitter. My father, who at the age of 58 chose to dig deep and identify the roots of his anxiety, taking him on a humbling journey towards emotional health. My uncle, whose wisdom and integrity get dismissed far too often by people who don’t appreciate what he can bring to the table, yet who continues to walk the line with humor and self-deprecation. Grandpa can’t take credit for how well his kids turned out - their present selves are entirely a product of God’s grace and patient work - but they are what he leaves behind. So. Because he’s gone and we can be generous, we’ll let them be his legacy. His children are doing the emotional work of confronting the past so that his grandchildren can walk uninhibited into the future.
On August 27, 2018, I called to wish him a happy birthday. I wasn't expecting him to pick up as he was never home since meeting 'that woman'. But to my surprise he answered, and when it became clear that I had totally mistaken the date (it was my grandmother's birthday, not his) he chuckled and began talking just like old times. For 30 providential minutes he reverted back to who he used to be to me; he was open and loving and happy. I hung up feeling like God had just given me a gift.
That was the last time we spoke. Since then things have gotten really bad. But I choose to remember him the way he was for those 30 minutes. Because it's a good ending, and it's the one I want to live on in my memory.
