Share a mem­ory or story about one or both of your grandfathers.

He sat in an over-sized chair in the liv­ing room wear­ing bib over­alls. One leg crossed over the other, his ankle rested on the oppo­site knee. He wore men’s clas­sic style leather slip­pers and the bot­toms of his pant legs were folded up form­ing cuffs. Every so often, he flicked the ashes from his ever-present cig­a­rette into the cuff of the pant leg perched on his knee. It seemed such a bizarre rit­ual to me and, although I never asked, I won­dered why my grand­mother tol­er­ated it.

He said very lit­tle. As I think back on those vis­its now, I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of him ever directly address­ing me, and yet I tell myself that he must have at least asked me how I was, how things were at school … But I can­not clearly hear his voice in my head. All I remem­ber is that he was soft-spoken and as I sat uncom­fort­ably on the couch across the room from him, I noted the resem­blance my father bore to him and won­dered if, as my father aged, he too would be bald.

I don’t remem­ber the day we learned that he had lung can­cer. But I do recall that there came a point when I was no longer to required to accom­pany my par­ents when they vis­ited him in the con­va­les­cent hos­pi­tal where he was spend­ing his last days. One night, they returned and told us that he had died while they were sit­ting at his bed­side. He was in a coma. My mother relayed that, as she gazed at him lying in the bed, she real­ized he was not breath­ing and alerted my father. The med­ical per­son­nel con­firmed that he was gone.

I was in the fourth grade and his was the first funeral I ever attended. My par­ents talked about the logis­tics in advance, so I knew that there would be two areas in which atten­dees would be seated. We would be in the larger of the two rooms, rather than on the couches in the lit­tle room off to the side where the rest of his fam­ily would gather. My father made it clear that he would be dri­ving us to the ser­vice at the funeral home and, after­ward, the ceme­tery, in his own car. We would not be join­ing his rel­a­tives in the funeral home’s limousine.

Frankly, the image of that old, bald man lying in the cas­ket is more vivid to me than all of the vis­its we paid to him in his home com­bined. I remem­ber think­ing how odd he looked. His face was dif­fer­ent; his skinned appeared waxy and as though it had been pulled tightly across his face. His lips were an odd shade of red. But what really stood out was his salmon color, double-breasted suit with the unusu­ally wide lapels. They were com­pletely out of place in 1966 when men, includ­ing my father on that cold Jan­u­ary day, wore dark suits with one row of but­tons and nar­row lapels.

I sat on the pew next to my father while a man I didn’t know talked about the man lying in the cof­fin behind him, whom I had never really known, either. Off to the side, I could see the room about which my par­ents had spo­ken and caught glimpses of my grand­mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins through the opaque cur­tain that sep­a­rated us from them.

Con­tinue reading …

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