My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.
]]>My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.
Bitter though it was, it was my grandfather's death that showed me exactly who Jeff was. I won't mourn my grandfather actively until the end of my days, but at the same time, my life will never quite be the same without him. My grandfather's death changed everything—not the least of which was a thoroughly-new relationship with some fellow named Jeff.Call it a love-letter, if you will, a love-letter born out of grief and isolation and all shades of angry hurt in between. Call it a love-letter from a girl I once was, to someone who correctly assumed I wouldn't be that way forever.
There are always days in which one wonders why they love the spouse they have. It is easy to forget in the day-to-day what was so extraordinary that made you sign the contracts to create this day-to-day routine.
Lucky me. I remember what was extraordinary.
May, 1996. I had finished washing clothes at Susan's apartment. My dorm room was in the building closest to the library. At the time, I worked in the computer lab located in the bottom floor of the library. While there, I received a phone call. My sister had somehow gotten the number of the computer lab, and her message was simple: "Come home. Now. Drop whatever you're doing. It's your grandfather."
Which is exactly what I did.
I came home and found—chaos. My grandfather, comatose after a stroke. A stillwatch. My mother, trying to comfort her mother. My sister, nine months pregnant and due any day.
I called Jeff, this person far away, this person newly in a relationship with me, and blurted out everything. It was the heavy black 1950s phone, heavy enough to clunk burglars with; it took both hands to hold. I cradled it in my hands and said, "Please come. I need you here."
He came. No questions asked, no argument. Seven hours of driving, into a family he didn't know, a girl he probably didn't know as well as he should have, and for a grandfather whom he had only met once. He nominally stayed in my sister's bedroom, but truthfully spent most of the time in mine. Comforting. Talking. Letting me talk.
My grandfather died in the late morning hours a couple of days later. Jeff called and made arrangements with his employer to stay in Arkansas for a day or two longer, so that he could stay with me for the funeral. The night of the funeral, we lay in bed, both of us on top of the covers, and I sobbed. There are many times in my life that I have cried, but few in which I've actually been distraught enough to lose all shreds of dignity and sob. I said to Jeff, "I never got the chance to tell him I loved him, and now I'll never have that chance again."
He used the pad of his thumb to brush away the most fat and offending tears, and said, "He knew. He knows."
Five years later, it sounds silly and melodramatic, doesn't it? Amazing, sometimes, how life echoes campy melodrama, makes the imaginable absurd and the absurd easily imaginable.
A month or two after the funeral, my mother hugged me and thanked me for being there for her during the entire ordeal. She, hesitating, brought up the subject of Jeff. She was quiet for a few moments and then said, "I don't know what he did while he was here. All I know is that he gave you the strength to be there for me when I know you needed comfort as much as I did. All I ever ask is that he love you and take care of you, and be there for you when you need someone in your life. Keep him."
Then…tonight.
Jeff's classes are over. He begins finals in a day or two. We had friends over tonight, and tonight he lounged on the couch and relaxed with us. It was a glimpse—tantalizing, brief, promising—of the loving and thoughtful person I married.
I remember what was extraordinary about you, Jeff, as surely as I know you are reading this. Tonight I remembered what it was about you that caused me to love you in the first place. You, of the big laugh and soft scratchy beard and dry wit and perceptive eyes. You, better than any other person, know why I am so determined to make sure that the people I love know that I love them.
You, better than any other person.
Welcome home. I have missed you so very, very much.
]]>Today is beautiful outside: the softer blue of sky that comes in spring, sunshine with real warmth in it. Most of the trees in the subdivision are dogwoods, and they are verging on the beginnings of bloom, Next week they will be fully blooming and stark white.Reminders: my grandmother's house. In the back there is an old, creaking porch swing that my grandfather built several years before he died. Before I was born, he planted a redbud sapling next to it.
The now fully-grown tree towers over the swing, with those peculiarly-shaped leaves. They are heart-shaped. Not as in vaguely heart shaped, but exactly heart-shaped. In early spring the tree flowers out in electric shades of dark pink and red; a technicolor budding.
My grandfather would sit squarely in the middle of the swing, his hands clutching either one or two canes, depending on how badly his back (broken in the 1950s) was ailing him that day. He had the most enormous hands, though they had been weakened by age and arthritis. Years of farm work and chopping wood had exchanged deftness for raw endurance and strength. As a child I was fascinated by his slow, patient way of knotting a fish hook onto monofilament line.
Proud to a fault, he never discussed the fact that he needed the canes. Nor would he discuss the effort that it took him to make it from the house to his seat outside. He needed to be there; the solace it gave was, in his mind, worth the negotiation of doorways and painful steps it took to get there.
I find myself staring outside the window of this room with, I suspect, much the same look on my face that he always had on his. He would stare out across the yard, out to his crops, his tinkering shed, to Johnny and Iva's house a half-mile down, next door. He was not looking for anything—just reminding himself of his world and his place in it.
Our landscapes and our creations live after us. The house still stands; the redbud expands ever-closer to the garage. The shed needs a new coat of paint, and its frail storm door needs a straighten or a replacement. The area between his house and Johnny-and-Iva's lies fallow, left for grass after my grandfather became too frail to plow it every year.
My grandmother laid Iva, her neighbor of decades, to rest last year after a brutal bout with cancer. My mother says she grieved deeply at the loss. For over thirty years, the two women had grown accustomed to twitching aside a curtain at night, checking for the daily, ritual extinguishment of lights. Their husbands had shared everything from farm equipment to fish.
I wonder, from a cautious distance, if the redbud has bloomed yet this spring, and whether Johnny leans out toward his window at night to check on the lights at my grandmother's house.
Where is your place?
]]>This from the person who spent all day Saturday hammering on a website to make it work. It's mostly there. geek-chick.net has been waiting for a few months to see the light of day, and I think I've finally gotten tired of waiting. When I got the offer to host it for free at my ISP, I decided to take advantage of that. The DNS for geek-chick.net hasn't propagated yet, so everything's still pointed at the old site (the one that starts off with, "Houston, we have finals"). At some random point in time, differing for each ISP, everything will point to the new site (which already has posts from friends on it). Then I will be much happier—because I will finally be able to test the silly guestbook script.
]]>This from the person who spent all day Saturday hammering on a website to make it work. It's mostly there. geek-chick.net has been waiting for a few months to see the light of day, and I think I've finally gotten tired of waiting. When I got the offer to host it for free at my ISP, I decided to take advantage of that. The DNS for geek-chick.net hasn't propagated yet, so everything's still pointed at the old site (the one that starts off with, "Houston, we have finals"). At some random point in time, differing for each ISP, everything will point to the new site (which already has posts from friends on it). Then I will be much happier—because I will finally be able to test the silly guestbook script.
It's funny—I can look back up at paragraphs like that and read through them and see how they must sound to you. A confessional of my day. But I look at them and see them for the hollowness they contain, and it bothers me; I know, even if you don't, that I'm not being totally honest.
January is a difficult month for my family and me. We don't talk about it, we don't acknowledge it, and we can't forget it. It's on our minds from the moment the page for December is torn off the calendar until the moment we can finally tear January away and move on to February.
It's been thirteen years.
Thirteen years since Keith killed himself.
Thirteen years since everything fell apart.
You don't forget. Sometimes you can forgive, and sometimes you can even come to understand. But I can look in my grandmother's eyes, or remember the look on my grandfather's face, and know that you can forgive and understand, but never quite get over the loss.
It was needless—but then again, is there such a thing as a needful suicide?
Keith was in a failing marriage. My family has a strong history of bipolar disorder (which was not quite so evident then), and we think now that Keith probably had an undiagnosed case. He was angry. He and his wife fought. Someone—either he or his wife—called his parents, who came over.
Keith went outside into the woods with a gun. His father—my grandfather—went outside to try to calm him down. Keith was angry, or despondent, or both. Apparently his wife was going to leave him. He turned the gun on himself and shot himself in front of my grandfather.
With that shot, something in my grandfather died. His troubled son, his youngest, the impetuous, red-headed one, died right before his eyes—in his arms. He lived eight more years in something of a daze, years that didn't mean nearly as much to him as the years that had come before 1988.
Soon after, it became a little bit harder to come home for Christmas. We didn't talk about his birthday. We certainly didn't talk about January, because if we didn't talk about it, it was (in a way) as if nothing had happened. The pictures began to quietly vanish from the walls and the desks.
Except for one, back in the bedroom that my grandmother slept in.
It was a small picture, black and white, of Keith shortly before he died. The picture is not of the man that I remember. In my memories, Keith's hair is always red. In this picture it is beginning to fade, and is wholly gray at the temples. His facial hair is beginning to gray.
And he is smiling at the camera—that broad, winning, devil-may-care smile that does hold true with my childhood memories.
I cannot count how many times I have picked up that picture and tried to look into it, past the camera and the eyes and the smile, to see behind the inscrutable mask of cheerfulness. To see the uncle that I never got the chance to know; the one my older sister dearly loved more than probably any member of our family.
Her favorite memory of him comes from 1982, when she would have been fifteen, and he in his mid-thirties. He lived down the road from my parents, and he called her one night and told her in that insistent, wheedling way that he had, that she needed to come outside right now.
He pulled up in his pickup truck. White, as I recall, but I might be wrong. It was a new album he'd bought—George Strait. "Listen to this," he said. "I love this song." She said that she lost count of how many times they drove around our "block" (which was over a mile around), listening to this song over and over.
"Amarillo by Morning," by George Strait, is one of the few songs ever written that can make my cry. If I hear it (which is a rarity now, thankfully), I leave the room. Too many memories, still too close to the surface. It's not the song or the lyrics or the singer. None of them, in my mind, are spectacular. But mental associations are stronger than aesthetics and time.
"Amarillo by morning
Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got
Is just what I've got on
I ain't got a dime
But what I've got is mine
I ain't rich, but Lord, I'm free
Amarillo by morning
Amarillo's where I'll be
Amarillo by morning
Amarillo's where I'll be"
—George Strait
Inside my grown-up exterior, inside the smiles and the busywork and the daily routine, is an eleven-year-old girl who still doesn't completely understand the events that went on. It's not difficult to be an intellectual adult and an emotional child—I've virtually mastered that art.
I just have to hope that somewhere, in some space, in some dimension, that Keith found his peace.
The rest of us are still looking.
Here's to another year without you, Keith. Here's to understanding, and faith, and solace, and the hope that maybe we'll find them when you couldn't.
]]>Rather appropriate, given that a burning car was involved. Well, if nothing else, a nasty bout of stomach flu would explain to my mother why I haven't written her yet this week.
]]>Rather appropriate, given that a burning car was involved. Well, if nothing else, a nasty bout of stomach flu would explain to my mother why I haven't written her yet this week.
The guilt got to me this afternoon, so I went to work today. Being out of work for three days this week meant that I've left some clients hanging. My guilty conscience got the better of me, so I went in for about five hours today and bashed out several pages. It should, hopefully, be enough so that this particular client can meet her obligations. A couple of her pages require some extra DHTML that I just didn't have time to put together this evening. I was willing to get a lot done today, but at the same time I've already accepted that I'm going to have a short paycheck from this pay period because of the time I missed. Since I knew it was impossible to make up all the time I'd missed, I wasn't very willing to tire myself out by working all day on a Sunday. That, and if I didn't get the groceries bought, they weren't going to get bought.
In other news, kudos to Andy for finally making me read Sluggy Freelance. I now have this deep fascination and amusement with Bun-Bun. If you read the comic, you'll understand.
I'm going to try to ratchet up my activities at home a bit in the next week or so. I don't like to use the holidays or the short daylight hours as a crutch, but I do always feel a bit more blue during the weeks before and after Christmas.
It's easy to fall back on nostalgic remembrances from childhood, even though I know that things weren't perfect. But it's hard not to long for the boisterous Christmases that I remember from when I was young; enough first cousins for a football team, if we could've stopped driving each other crazy long enough to play together as a team. It's easy to forget that there were family tensions and problems, even then, because as children we weren't privy to them yet.
Innocence and snow, that's what I miss. Today it was warm enough not to need a jacket outside, and it's December! For Christmas this year, I'd like a fat blanket of dense, wet snow. Enough to build a snowman with; enough to leave real footprints behind when you walk on it.
Not enough to bring down power lines, but enough to put back a little of the shine that the world had when we were children. Just enough to put a bit of gloss over some of the ugliness that adult eyes see, to replace, if only for a few minutes, duty with joy and remembrance.
Then I could go outside and make chubby round snow angels with pointy ears and cat tails and look up at the sky and wonder if my grandfather could see the whimsical, sentimental adult that I've started to become over the past few years.
If he could see me now, I wonder what he'd say? I guess I'll always wonder.
The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is when I miss him the most. They're thoughts I only let out when no one is looking; it's been four years now and there's still that empty spot in my heart reserved for him. The right [or wrong] memory can still bring quiet tears and a catch in my throat.
As a child I desperately wanted his approval; he was Santa and the tooth fairy and a little bit of magic all rolled up into one gruff-voiced, stiffly walking package. As a teenager I couldn't see far enough past myself to understand that I wouldn't have him around forever.
When I was nineteen I met Jeff. At that point, my grandfather was severely ill. I came to him while he was in the hospital and I sat by his left side and I said, "I need your opinion, because I think this one's the one." He met Jeff one time. They talked about cattle and farming and inconsequential things, and when it was over he relayed his approval through my grandmother.
He died not long thereafter.
He never saw the joy on my face after Jeff proposed to me. He never saw me turn twenty, nor graduate from college, nor get married, nor move away.
Every year since then, around this time of year, my thoughts turn to him. I wonder what he'd think of me. I'm not sure he would have totally approved of my brashly independent streak, but I think he would have respected me for it.
If I could have any Christmas present in the world, it would be to go back and tell him that I loved him, and know that he heard me and understood. Because of all the things in this world that I've wanted in this life and couldn't have, that's the one I want the most.
]]>