The Grandfather I Never Knew (Part One)

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.

Although I could not shake the vague sense that I should feel sad, I had no real emo­tional attach­ment to the man in the cas­ket. I had never got­ten the sense that my par­ents did, either, until I looked up at my father and saw him wip­ing tears from his cheek. I had never seen him cry before and it was only then that I real­ized that the man I always called “Daddy” had lost his own father. Still, his emo­tional reac­tion was baf­fling given that we never cel­e­brated hol­i­days or birth­days with any of his fam­ily mem­bers, and the only time we saw my grand­par­ents was when my mother would announce, “Well, I guess we should go visit your par­ents.” My father never said any­thing more than “I sup­pose” in response, but he would duti­fully arise from his recliner and get ready to go. Then we would grudg­ingly pile into the car for the less than one mile jour­ney to their house. We were never offered even a cookie or glass of milk, and usu­ally didn’t even remove our coats. Rather, we sat in silence lis­ten­ing to the grown-ups “visit” for what my par­ents deemed a respectable period of time. And then one of them — usu­ally my father — would announce that “we’d bet­ter be going.” We would trek back to the car, come home, and savor the relief that accom­pa­nies the knowl­edge that you have per­formed some type of duty. Until the next time, that is.

When my friends talked about their grand­fa­thers, I was awestruck. I won­dered why I was not blessed with grand­par­ents who invited me to spend the night at their house, take me on adven­tures with them, bake birth­day cakes for me or do any of the myr­iad other things that grand­par­ents usu­ally love doing with and for their grand­chil­dren. To this day, I don’t fully under­stand why we were, for all intents and pur­poses, estranged from my father’s fam­ily, although I gleaned bits and pieces of their dys­func­tional his­tory from my mother over the years. My father said pre­cious lit­tle about it, although his actions spoke vol­umes. I wish now that I had asked him more ques­tions about his feel­ings when I had the chance. His thoughts on the mat­ter are for­ever lost to me.

But that’s one of the rea­sons why I decided to return to Lodi after spend­ing a few years liv­ing in other parts of Cal­i­for­nia. I rea­soned that if I ever had chil­dren, I wanted them to live near their grand­par­ents and enjoy the kind of rela­tion­ship with them that I never had the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence. I antic­i­pated that my par­ents would be involved, lov­ing grand­par­ents and I was absolutely right. In fact, I used to watch them inter­act­ing with the boys and jok­ingly ask, “Who are you peo­ple and what have you done with my par­ents?” To say that they doted on their pre­cious grand­sons would be an under­state­ment. They seemed vir­tu­ally reborn after their first grand­child, my old­est nephew, Paul, arrived.

To be continued …

Next week’s topic:

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

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