Tad

My grandfather is dying in percentages.  20% alive, 80% dead.  Diminished Lung Capacity.  Sitting on the couch, not moving, not smiling, not talking, drifting in and out of sleep, you’d think he’s a zombie.  The living dead.

In the hospital, when he realized he wasn’t going to die, and knew that he wanted to live, he was the grandfather of my memories.

“If this makes things worse, I’ll...” he told the nurse who had come to give him his breathing treatment, “I’ll kill you!”

“Uh oh,” she laughed.  “I’d better be careful then.” And we laughed too, relieved to see glimpses of the character we all loved.

I look at him now, reclined, belt splayed open, pants half-unzipped and I am embarrassed.  As if I’ve caught him coming out of the shower with no towel.  Naked, vulnerable, exposed.

“Grandpa, I’ve been weeding,” I tell him, wanting to please him.  Wanting to let him know that things at home were being tended to.

“Thank you.”  His unabashed gratitude embarrasses me.  I’m no saint.  I only started to get out of cleaning.  I did it so that I could smoke.

“It all started ‘cuz I couldn’t walk,” he tells me as an explanation for the neglect of his flower beds.  “And if you can’t walk, you can’t breathe.”  The cyclical relationship between motion and air.

We talk about his bird feeders.

“I always liked those... What are the yellow ones called?”

“The Goldfinches?”  I pretend not to notice that he can’t remember.

When I was a child, he taught me all the interesting birds.  The Goldfinch.  The birds named after their song.  Chick-a-dee-dee-dee.  Bob-white.  He loved watching the birds.

“Right.  I love those little guys, how they flip upside down to eat.  They’re the only bird that can do that.”  He says this to me with his back facing the large window to the backyard.  A goldfinch eats behind him.

Yes, grandpa.  I remember.  And now I’m teaching Abby.

I remember a sharp-witted man who loved needlepoint.  Who constructed beautiful works of art stitch by stitch that hang on his walls as if in a museum.  But now he can’t see the detail. Macular degeneration.  The last time he worked his stitches were jagged and out of place.  He could only work on plastic canvas, the stuff they gave me when I was a child.

I remember playing cards.  Three thirteen.  Hand and Foot.  Rummy based games with runs and sets and complicated rules. 

“I think they made them up.” said Tom after his first indoctrination of family card games.  “Some weird little Davis game.”

Somehow, between ordering the deck into a straight pile and neatly displaying his formed sets, my grandfather’s team always won.  Now, the large numbered deck gathers dust in a drawer.  He’s lost the killer instinct.

In the hospital, when I was holding my grandfather’s hand, he asked me about school.  I filled him in on my last year.  “Are you sure you know enough about English to teach it?” he quizzed me.  He was famous for finding clever ways of correcting my shameful grammar and we would laugh. 

“Ah, grandpa.  There’s this cool theory of learning called constructivism.  Basically, what that means is that the best learning will come when I learn right along with my students.  I don’t have to know anything.”  I wait for him to roll his eyes.

Now he doesn’t even seem to notice the “me and Debbie’s” that fall carelessly from my lips.

A few years ago my grandfather told me a story.

“A man that we knew from church said ‘Tad, with six kids you must either be Catholic or a real sex machine...  And I know you’re not Catholic.”

My aunts talk about walking into their parents room to find their twin beds pushed together.  An awkward embarrassment.

Now my grandmother vacuums right outside of the bedroom door in the morning to wake him up.  She turns off the vacuum and peeks into his room.  “I knew that would do it,” she smiles, a twinkle in her eye.

In the hospital, when he thought he was going to die, my grandfather re-enlisted a code that he and my grandmother had developed with when they were courting.

One squeeze – I love you.

Two squeezes – How much?

Big long squeeze.

In the hospital he couldn’t breathe and was afraid.  “How are you feeling, grandpa?”

“Good enough for some handholding.”  So I took his hand in mine and he squeezed hard and didn’t let go.  I’d never touched my grandfather before.  Only hugs and a peck at hello’s and good-bye’s.  Never before had I experienced such intimacy with another human being.

When Abby and I go to visit his face lights up at the sight of the busy, uninhibited two-year old.  She walks right up to him and touches his leg, “Ga-lam-pa!” she squeals with delight, pronouncing her “L” very distinctly.  She places all of her toys in the vinyl collect-all at the base of his walker.  It is her car.  She sits between the legs and drives, something he can’t do anymore.

She’s playing in their screened in back porch pulling the cushions off the white rattan chairs and placing them carefully on the table.  “Pizza” she announces.  My grandfather walks out there to watch her play.  She hands him one of the boxes.

“This is the first time he’s tried to go out there all weekend,” my aunt tells me.  “She’s good for him.”

“I’m tired of being married to an old person,” my grandmother says as she searches the dishwasher and the freezer for the inhaler that she’s misplaced.  Sixty two years of marriage and this is what it comes to.  Young verses old.    Once full of life, now a fountain of petty resentment ‘cuz she’s never been to China.  Will never walk on the Great Wall.  And it’s all His fault.  Because he can’t breathe worth a shit.

I always knew that one day my grandparents would die.  Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I didn’t believe it to be true.  When they were in their seventies, they were the youngest old people I knew.  Traveling to Russia and Scandinavia and Alaska.  But they’ve turned a corner, into the land of octogenarians.  85 and 84 (“I robbed the cradle,” my grandmother used to joke.).

It never occurred to me that their last life would be like this.  Shells of their former selves riding the line between competency and incapacitation.  Tiptoeing along love and resentment.  Laundry list of medication.  Living in filth.  Sniping and resignation.  Just sitting around, waiting for it to happen while the landscaping becomes overrun with weeds and the birdfeeders empty.