I Will Follow You Into the Dark

My paternal grandfather died last Saturday, March 23, 2013. He was 92 years old. For the past several years of his life he had a slow moving blood cancer, the kind that grinds you down but doesn’t kill you outright. I don’t think the cancer was the cause of his death, but I am unsure.

He didn’t want a memorial service or funeral, so there will not be one. He didn’t want an obituary, so none was published. He donated his body to science, so his last act as a human is to be dissected by others. His wife of 72 years, my grandmother, will follow the same path when she passes away.

I am surprised at how I am affected by this. Not by his passing or the choices he made on how he wanted his death handled. My grandfather was religious enough to believe that death was not a reason for mourning; it was the passage to the next part of a soul’s journey. When my dad, resorting to a bit of dark humor, told me about the medical donation, he finished with the comment “There wasn’t much left of him to donate”. I replied that [my grandfather] would have enjoyed having the last laugh on the subject.

I mourn the opportunities I missed to know him better. Up until high school I saw them every 1-2 years. My paternal grandmother (his wife) was incredibly critical of my mother, to the point that she blamed my mother for my father’s problems, which lead to a breach between the two of them that lasted almost 20 years.

My grandfather tried to mediate between his wife and my mother, but was unsuccessful. They became such a contentious subject that for several years after the final fight between my grandmother and my mother, I did not talk about them in my mother’s presence and I saw them only twice more between high school and last Saturday.

So I missed out. I missed out on knowing sooner that my grandfather was not the teetotaler of my childhood memories, but the type of man who enjoyed a glass of champagne on a Sunday afternoon. I missed out on knowing sooner that he had been stationed in France during World War II and part of his work, as an Army Private, was to transport the officer’s liquor rations from Paris to the camp. That he loved Paris. I will never know of his love of champagne is connected to the time he spent in France.

I will never know many things about him now. And that makes me sadder then anything.