My grandfather’s funeral was last week.
It was not a surprise, as he had been declining sharply due to prostate cancer lately. And just a couple of weeks before, the hospice worker told Dad that she thought he only had two weeks or so left. He even went down to the funeral home and told them exactly what he wanted while he was still able to get around.
But sometimes people beat so many odds and so many prognoses over the years that it still feels like a surprise when something finally catches up with them. It’s hard to face the loss of such a warm, generous soul when I think about all the things I had hoped he would stick around for.
Mostly I’m just grateful that he lived a good life, and that we had him for as long as we did. His eleven great-grandchildren are lucky they got to know him—so many people don’t get a chance to know their grandparents, let alone their great-grandparents.
Some of my favorite memories of him:
- Pretending to eat bugs in order to amuse us kids
- Singing along while my grandmother played guitar at the lake house
- Treating everybody to ice cream on the way back from the beach
- Stealing back any money he had given us for Christmas, to teach us not to leave cash lying around (this method REALLY works)
- Teaching me to drive a stick shift and cackling uproariously every time I stalled out
- Pulling me aside just before my wedding, pressing my grandmother’s wedding band into my palm, and saying “You’ve always been the most like her, you know?”
After a trip back to West Virginia in recent years, he told me that the main street in his hometown of Rainelle was reduced to mostly empty storefronts. He stopped in to talk to a storekeeper, who told him they had lost pretty much everything in a flood, not that business had been exactly booming before. My grandfather said that looking around there all these years later made him feel like he “made the right choice coming here.”
I didn’t know until interviewing him for Storycorps last year that he was born in a shanty-town next to Rainelle, and that when they later moved to company housing and had a “commode” they thought it was really something. As a kid he couldn’t always get new shoes when he needed them, and I remember saying “Really PawPaw?” to this when he told me about it, and he said “Well I was lucky. I had cousins that didn’t have any shoes at all!”
The story of how he ended up here is a familiar one, fondly retold amongst the family. Almost everyone in Rainelle worked in either lumber or coal, and it was while doing his time in the mines that my grandfather got into a barfight and was thrown (along with his adversary) into the drunk tank to cool off. “While we were sitting there all night, we kinda made up. And the guy told me about these chemical factory jobs he had heard about in Virginia.” Long story short, PawPaw talked his brother-in-law into driving him all the way to Hopewell to investigate, and that’s how they ended up moving both their families here.
I often think about how different my life would be if he hadn’t taken that chance, and if he had stayed put in West Virginia. Not that I would even exist exactly as I am, my parents having met in the 70s at Hopewell High School. But there’s not much use wondering about it, as I think he would have found better opportunities come hell or high water—personal sacrifice and wanting more for his children than he had seemed to be the bedrock of his life.
Every time my kids—whose closets are absolutely lousy with shoes—complain that they “hardly got to watch ANY tablet today” I think about how lucky they are to even have such a problem. And how my grandfather worked his tail off so my dad could have a better life, and my dad worked his tail off so I could have a better life. I work my tail off so my kids can have a better life too, and some days I feel like my entire soul has been scraped out and pounded flat by some combination of corporate life, extroverts, and the internet. But I’ll take an overabundance of Slack notifications over handling Kepone (as my grandfather did) any day. And it’s my great privilege to be able to make that choice.
Gratefulness is the main thing I’m trying to communicate here.
I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of it, or if I manage to impart gratefulness as a key trait lodged in the psyches of my kids.
Telling the kids about losing their Grampy (as they called him), I wasn’t sure they really understood. Cora said “Aw man!” and walked off, appropriately callous for a 3-year-old, and I think he would have found that hilarious. Morella seemed to get it but didn’t say much about it. At the gravesite last week, I think she was (understandably during These Times) just really happy to catch a glimpse of her cousin.
But she walked in the door slowly from visitation the other night and came into my office and put her head on my shoulder silently. After a while she said simply, “I miss Grampy.”
Me too, kid. Me too.
parasol party 