My mom called on me the thirtieth. I was in a very cheery mood, and picked up the phone expecting it to be a call saying we left something at my parents’ house (we had just got back home on the 27th) or having a suggestion for Matt’s laptop, which I’d been working on.
But instead, she told me that my grandpa, who was in Turkey doing missionary work, had a heart attack the day before and died.
I keep detachedly observing how weird it feels. This is the first time I’ve had a relative that I actually knew die. Several of my great grandparents died when I was younger, but I don’t really remember much about them, and only have vague memories and knick-knacks to go off of. It feels like it’s happening to someone else.
We weren’t close, I don’t think. What’s close? We disagreed on almost everything, I keep remembering the day when he and my grandma were repeatedly telling me how pretty I used to be before I had done that to myself (I had a green mohawk at the time), how I was never going to find a boy who would marry me, how I was ruining my hair, etc. They were telling me all of this in between phone calls to my cousin’s lawyer, that they were paying for; my cousin was on trial for homicide. You’d think that’d put things in perspective. Apparently not.
Which is probably not what I should be remembering at a time like this, but there it is.
I seem to have skipped all of the other emotions of grief and keep going back and forth between anger and sadness. After I burst into tears on the phone, I started speaking again with “Didn’t you tell him not to go off his cholesterol medication, Mom?! Didn’t you say this would happen? Why didn’t he listen?”
It feels weird, like I said. It feels like one of those injuries that you forget about, until you touch it just the wrong way and the pain comes searing back. I feel fine most of the time, perky even. I enjoy the new year burst of energy & I’ve been making some changes to my morning routine that make me feel great. And then at a particularly happy moment I’ll feel guilty, I’ll feel like I should be more sad than I am, I’ll stumble across some knick knack that my grandparents gave me and have to sit down.
I feel terrible for my grandma. I can’t imagine how she must feel, they were married for a long time. Forty years, probably? She’s going to come back to her house, after being gone for a year and a half, and not have him there. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about family members taking advantage of her.
She would send us emails from wherever they were at – they started in Russia, and got transferred to Turkey – about once a week or once every two weeks. She started last week’s email before he died. And finished it afterwards. She seemed to be taking it well – she’s very good at staying positive. I hope she’ll be okay.
My dad said at least grandpa didn’t spend months in a hospital and die slowly and painfully. I guess that’s true. He died knowing who he was, recognizing and loving family members, and that’s more than a lot of people get.
I would love to say I have some pithy message to end this with, about time is short, die happy, blah blah blah. I don’t, really. (Although part of me wants to say “take your effing cholesterol medication”. So there is that.) Y’all already know all of that, I hope. But maybe you should contact a family member you haven’t spoken in a while (that you’d like to speak to, I mean) in case you’ve forgotten.
The funeral is tomorrow, we’re making our way back to Missouri today – regular posting will resume on Monday.
