Death

There are few moments in my life that I remember with clarity. And when I say this, I very much mean moments. I am not sure there is a single full day in my life that I can fully recall, and entire months are lost to me. Many of my memories are only vague recollections, which are often disputed by my friends and family who likely remember those events far better than I do. But, of the few moments I do remember, I remember them with an utmost clarity. I can close my eyes and see them in vivid detail in my mind's eye. Some are of real moments, and some are of dreams which I have had. But the one I wish to speak of now is the death of my grandfather.

There are many moments related to his death, and while many tales are told chronologically, I believe his is one best told as he would tell it: with no logical order. I remember waking up to the sound of knocks on my door. I opened my eyes very groggily. There wasn't much light - it was early in the morning. "Hey," I heard my father say. "Listen. Papa... Papa's dead."

I looked at him, only half awake. I nodded to him. "Okay," I said. He nodded back and closed the door as he left. It was still fairly dark. It was perhaps five in the morning - a pretty typical time for things with my grandfather to be occurring, his death being no exception. Later on, when others were waking up and seeing my text about his death, I would receive many words of encouragement and heartfelt messages.

For the time, I went back to sleep.

It had started several months beforehand. Papa had always been a little out of it, a little weak. He was supposed to walk with a cane, but he never did. I suppose he was too proud for it. If he even knew what pride was at the time. It was raining that night as we went to dinner, and unfortunately the parking lot in front of the restaurant was packed. We had to park a good distance away, up a hill and behind the building. For dad and I, it was no big deal. But Papa...

We didn't expect him to fall. We didn't expect him to slam his head into the soaked metal handrail, nor to smack a second time against the hard concrete step. We certainly didn't expect his spine to unfortunately smash into the sharp angle of the end of the step. But it all did. It happened in an instant - we didn't even see it. He was behind us at the time.

Stupid. He was an old man. Why did we leave him in the dust?

I remember standing in solemn silence as the people around me cried. I didn't know everyone who was there. To be honest, I don't think everyone who was there knew grandfather. The priest certainly didn't. I played guitar and sang Amazing Grace with my friend - we did a pretty good job. It pushed the tears out harder.

Papa had once scared the shit out of me months after he had returned from the hospital. I wasn't paying much attention to him at the time, because he had been sleeping in his chair in the living room. I didn't realize he had woken up until I heard his wheelchair rolling across the hallway floor. I figured he was going to his room, as he was prone to do. But then the front door opened.

I leapt off the couch in a panic to find this old, virtually paralyzed, insane old man trying to climb out of the house - quite literally - and barely hanging on to the door frame. I forced him back into his wheel chair and rolled him away from the door, closing it as soon as I could. I demanded to know what the hell he was thinking, and his response was confounding at the time, but became one of my favorite running gags.

"It's ok," he told me. "We can go home now."

Somehow he had decided we had four homes. Each in different places. Each looked exactly the same. If you changed anything in any of the houses, it changed in all of them. And we were in the wrong one.

After the funeral, people asked me why I didn't cry. In fact, none of us who had lived with Papa had cried. We simply weren't sad. People saw his death as us having lost him, and I can understand why they thought that. But they hadn't experienced his last days like we had. The truth was, we had been waiting for him to die. It was easier on everyone that way. Him included.

We had lost Papa the moment he had fallen. Everything leading up to his death was little more than a reminder that he was already gone.