My Grandfather

Well, what can I say about my grandfather in particular? He was a mostly quiet man. He was simple and enjoyed sitting out on his front porch watching us grandkids playing in the front yard. My relationship with him was distant at best, I never really new the old man with tired eyes and sunbaked brown skin. The little I knew of him was that he lost his wife to a blood clot, raised most of his children by himself on a 6^th grade education and a sugar factory worker salary. I knew that my mother had a very estranged relationship with him and I think that added to the distance between him and myself. I just new this sad, almost grumpy-looking man, who didn’t say much and kept to himself.

When he died I felt an absence but not in the way most would think. I lived life with a single parent and no ties to my paternal grandparents, and little to no contact with my step grandparents when my mother married. This man was the only grandparent I had ever known or interacted with in my life and I didn’t have much of a relationship with him. Perhaps, at the age of 17, I understood this on some level because I wept. I cried more than I expected to over a man I barely knew. There he was in the casket, as if he were sleeping, almost having me believe that he would get up at any moment and I will feel the heavy presence of his quiet brooding demeanor I had always known of him. All I could think of in that moment was the sadness of the relationship we could never have.

I grew up in a community where kids bragged about grandparents, what they got to do with them and their relationships. I have one distant memory from when I was very young, of a trip to Disney world with him and my mother. I remember the trip, but through the eyes of a child so while I remember the place we stayed, the fun in the parks, and the pool I swam in with my brand new pink floaties, I don’t remember any real interactions with my grandfather, other than him getting frustrated with me freaking out about mosquito bites and not understanding why I was so afraid of bugs in general. He sometimes looked at me in those moments as if I was some sort of foreign or alien creature. In a way, I think we both looked at each other that way, we both saw each other as alien and could not find a neutral middle ground to understand one another. Sometime after that, my mother took a sort of hiatus from the family, robbing us of more time to try to understand each other. I understood then and I understand now why she put distance between us and them but so much time, time for clarity and healing, was lost.

Here I am 12 years later and I still don’t even know who that man really was and I don’t think I ever will.