(Note: I started this post on Sep 25 at about 7am, I am finishing it today, Oct 1)
I am up really early because I was having dreams about my grandfather. He died exactly a week ago today...to the minute actually. Death hasn't touched my life very many times, I've been lucky in that way I suppose. I've known people who have died but nobody I was particularly close to, this is my first "real" death. Not that I was particularly close to my grandfather, but he was consistently present in my life in a way that most people other than my immediate family have not been because of the circumstances in which I grew up.
Not to be terribly morbid or descriptive but I was present for the entire process of my grandfather's death, from hospital bed to casket.* I think that I'm handling it pretty well. It was not a huge surprise that grandpa wasn't going to be around much longer, he was 96. What's funny about the timing is that before he broke his hip, the cataclysmic event that started the whole process, he started to tell my grandmother than he wasn't going to be around for much longer. He told her he had a week left and a week later he fell. Various family members have told me that they began to dream about my grandfather. One of my uncles had a dream in which my grandfather came to him as his 35 year old self. My uncle said that he didn't recognize my grandfather but grandpa told him he was going home. My sister had a dream of my grandmother at almost the exact moment my grandfather passed on. In her dream she was looking around while she comforted my sobbing grandmother but she couldn't find our grandfather and when she woke up she knew he was gone. And I had my dream this morning, where my grandfather was in his death bed, but this time he recognized me (which I'm not sure he was able to do in the hospital) and told me he was going to be fine, that he was okay.
It's pretty amazing how connected we are in life and in death. But not necessarily in grieving. At least not in my family. Everybody grieved alone, throughout the entire thing. Family members went for long walks when they became overwhelmed. I don't think anybody really cried together, my family of stoics. It reminded me that I have chosen and am working on a life for myself where that needn't be the case, that solitary confinement of our emotional selves.
In the end, my grandfather will be remembered for being a great man. He loved his family, particularly his wife of almost 61 years. He loved his god. He loved people and people loved him right back. He understood concepts like hard work and integrity and sacrifice. But he knew how to have fun and could make almost anybody smile. I will always be sad that I didn't get to know him better, that I don't have more memories of him and with him, but I'm happy for the ones I do have.
*This weekend I am driving down to Oregon to help scatter his ashes, the final step in the physical process of my grandfather's death.
