fifteen years later

Today is fifteen years since my Grandpa Linn died. I took a creative writing class my last year of college and wrote my personal essay about his death. I don't really have a good place to post it so this will have to do. It feels fitting for today. 

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Grief Hangs On

My grandpa died around 4 o’clock on the morning of September 16, 2009.

The night before, my dad all but carried him up the stairs because his body had wasted away too much to walk alone but he refused to sleep in the hospital bed they had set up in the family room.

“My dad lived until his knees gave out,” my dad told me.

It took them an hour to get up the stairs together—Grandpa stopping after every step to rest on Dad’s knee, his own reduced to bone. When he was finally lying in bed, he told my dad, “Thank you.”

He was restless that night. My grandma didn’t sleep much. Early in the morning, she got up to get him an extra blanket to fend off the cold. “Thank you,” he told her again and again, “Thank you for everything.”

He closed his eyes and he was gone.

Memory is a funny thing. There are three things I remember from the day my grandpa died, but the more I talk to the others who were there the more I realize that my memory is faulty.

This I know: I didn’t find out that Grandpa had died until four hours after.

I was still homeschooled at that point, so my mom always woke me up around 8 A.M. There was nothing unusual about the timing when she came in that morning, but it wasn’t usually so sunny, and she didn’t usually have my brothers with her, and she didn’t usually have that look on her face. I didn’t have time to ask her what was wrong before she told me that Grandpa had died. In the months leading up to that moment, when we all knew he was going to die but I was refusing to believe it, I had tried to imagine what my reaction would be to finding out it had happened. Out of everything I had pictured, I didn’t know I was going to fold my arms over my eyes like maybe if I hid there long enough, it wouldn’t be true. 

But when I opened my eyes again, Grandpa was still dead and my mom and brothers were still there. The sun was still coming through my curtains, and I couldn’t figure out why it was so bright. We knelt by my bed to pray and it came bleeding through my eyelids. We drove over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house to join the rest of the family and it beat down on the asphalt and the man taking his trash out like it was any other Wednesday and I hadn’t just lost someone.

I remember walking under the trees out back with two cousins who weren’t actually cousins, because they were the children of my uncles’ ex-wife and ex-girlfriend respectively, but of course they were there. He was as much their grandpa as mine. Except Grandma tells me that Shawn wasn’t there that day. My younger brother Mark who was six at the time remembers him coming weeks later, and only then finding out Grandpa had died. But Shawn is in the pictures at the funeral.

Certainly this walk happened. Only I can’t figure out when.

Whenever it was, I crossed the stream with Shawn and Asia and we sat between the roots of a tree stump and remembered and remembered and remembered. We remembered Grandkids’ Night and spaghetti and pancakes in the shape of our first initials. They cried. I didn’t cry.

I remember pulling my dad aside sometime that evening because I wasn’t crying and I didn’t know why. I hadn’t cried once all day, not when Mom told me, not when I talked to my cousins, not at all. There was an odd sort of guilt and panic that was rising in me. Did this mean I didn’t love my grandpa? Did it mean I wasn’t as sad as everyone else? Dad sat with me on one of the chairs Grandpa had upholstered in the living room and explained about grief. We all feel it differently and express it differently, he explained, and even if I wasn’t crying on the outside, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t mourning on the inside.

There was some part of me that had been convinced that I must not have cared about my grandpa, that I must not really be sad for his loss. I thought I was selfish for not crying, and selfish for worrying more about my own outward expression than anything else. It was this conversation with my dad that taught me I wasn’t awful, that grief doesn’t always make sense. It’s this conversation that I come back to when I need that reminder.

I asked my dad the other day if he remembers this moment that I have held onto as a lifeline through the years. As I started telling him, he finished the sentence for me, telling me exactly where I sat when it happened. That conversation was significant to him too, because my dad and I are so similar sometimes. Our brains sabotage us in the same ways. He told me, “Sometimes I wonder. Did I really grieve?” In the months after, people would ask him how he was doing, and he was always fine. He never had a moment where everything was bad, and then it was alright.

He told me sometimes he walks upstairs and sees the photo of his dad and breaks down.

“It was a blur,” Grandma told me about that day. “I was in shock. The doctor had told us the sickness was terminal, but I had no idea it would be so soon.” She went to the funeral home with my dad to figure out all the details that they didn’t know they would have to worry about yet. Family came flocking in for the memorial, but she can’t remember where they stayed.

My mom tells me that children tend to grieve differently than adults. She noticed everyone that day: the neighbors and friends who came in a steady stream bringing food and flowers and cards; my grandma sitting numbly, surrounded by her children; and us, the kids who didn’t really understand death yet but knew that Grandpa was gone. 

Mark, the youngest of us, seemed to compartmentalize the most out of any of us. Either he was playing in the toy room like it was any other day at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, or he was having a meltdown. The two didn’t touch.

“It’s a defense mechanism,” my mom tells me. 

My older brother, Braeden, was twelve at the time. He was the closest of all of us to Grandpa Linn. When he was dying, Braeden went over almost every day to talk and play chess with him. He had been with him the day before but hadn’t said goodbye when he left because he was running late to Cub Scouts. Out of all my siblings, Grandpa’s death hit Braeden the hardest.

“I hate negative emotion,” Braeden told me, “so much.” He refused to go over to Grandma’s house with us the next day because he couldn’t exist in that grief. He spent the day with a neighbor playing GameCube. He told me how guilty he felt at not saying goodbye, and maybe he didn’t want to face that, or maybe he just didn’t want to be surrounded by so much sadness. Either way, he doesn’t remember making that choice. “I didn’t remember for the longest time,” he said, “I must have suppressed it.” 

Braeden tells me he doesn’t think about it much. The time that passes between being sad gets longer and longer. But he told me he felt the loss hard after our second cousin’s wedding two Octobers ago when he saw Grandpa’s sisters who are so much like him. Braeden went back the hotel room and sobbed, his wife of only a few months at that point not sure what to do. That was ten years after Grandpa’s death. 

In eighth grade, I cried in my bed late one night because I missed him so much. I can’t find it now, but I wrote an overly melodramatic poem for my Language Arts about how sadness hangs on. That was three years after Grandpa’s death.

Two months after he died, my grandma was in the grocery store Fred Meyer and saw the big boxes of nuts that Grandpa would always buy around Christmas time. She broke down in the middle of the store. She hasn’t been able to buy them since.

“Everything seems different now that I live in After,” my dad wrote once, “I did not know until he was gone that part of what I thought was me was really him.”

There are moments like that, things you don’t notice until someone is gone. I didn’t realize how hollow just calling it “Grandma’s house” would feel in the beginning. I didn’t realize that Grandma selling the old Cadillac would be almost like losing him all over again. I didn’t realize that Thursdays, the day Grandpa used to take us swimming, would hurt for a while. That day of the week still feels significant, twelve years later. All over, I find these little reminders of him, these signs that he was here and that he mattered.

Grief is odd. It’s long, but it’s not all consuming. In with the bad days, there is good. Whenever Mark can build something on instinct alone, we say he’s like Grandpa Linn. Whenever Dad gets cantankerous about some mistake a restaurant made, we say he’s like his dad. Whenever I see the Dr. Pepper Jelly Bellies at work, I think of him.

I haven’t stopped missing Grandpa Linn. I don't think I ever will. But I'm also alright. Grief hangs on, but so does love.