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My grandfather died Friday.
This was not a surprise, Grandpa Max was somewhere in the neighborhood of 90, and he'd beaten the odds amazingly well to that point. A lifelong pipe smoker, he adapted to emphysema and asthma, and never suffered cancer. He overcame alcoholism, and survived the suicide of his eldest son. Admittedly, Max was deaf as a post, but even that was overcome with technology.
By all accounts, Grandpa was not a kind man, but he might be called a good one. He called my father 'Tink' to his dying day, short for 'Little Stinker', and was only dissuaded from granting similar handles to my brother and I by the sheer ferocity of my mother. He amused himself by turning his hearing aids all the way down, making you shout in public, getting you to embarrass yourself in restaurants. But if someone needed help, Max would get there as quick as he could.
He grew up in a different world, even though that world was labeled 'Washington' or 'Oregon'. He survived the Great Depression, watched WWII, made enough money selling hardware to set himself up as an independent realtor, before that was fashionable. How Grandpa showed affection and care was not the way that you or I would, not until late in his life. He preferred the casual insult or the dutch rub to the head, and I never heard him say "I love you" until I was in my 20s.
I am not grieving the loss, as it was expected, and though it sounds unusual, what sorrow exists is mixed with an equal measure of relief, leaving me oddly neutral. However, I do have regrets. Only in the past few years had Grandpa Max tried reaching out to me as a fellow adult. Sharing his interests and hobbies with the 'normal one' brought us a little closer together, in a way that he could show how he cared about you, without actually saying it. I enjoyed the times we could actually talk (when he had his hearing aids turned on) about woodcarving, or the figures of myth.
With all that has gone on in the past few years, I have had little time to stay regularly in touch with him. A letter once or twice a year, an appropriate Christmas gift. We would disagree about some things, we would agree on others, all the while I was learning from him. I couldn't always tell you that I learned anything useful, but rather I learned something about Grandpa, and what made him who he was.
So, no, I am not sad about his death, except that I regret the opportunities lost, to have made his last few years a little richer, and perhaps a little more interesting, by reaching out to him as he had to me.
Farewell, Max. You may have been a hard bastard, but never let it be said that you didn't care.
This was not a surprise, Grandpa Max was somewhere in the neighborhood of 90, and he'd beaten the odds amazingly well to that point. A lifelong pipe smoker, he adapted to emphysema and asthma, and never suffered cancer. He overcame alcoholism, and survived the suicide of his eldest son. Admittedly, Max was deaf as a post, but even that was overcome with technology.
By all accounts, Grandpa was not a kind man, but he might be called a good one. He called my father 'Tink' to his dying day, short for 'Little Stinker', and was only dissuaded from granting similar handles to my brother and I by the sheer ferocity of my mother. He amused himself by turning his hearing aids all the way down, making you shout in public, getting you to embarrass yourself in restaurants. But if someone needed help, Max would get there as quick as he could.
He grew up in a different world, even though that world was labeled 'Washington' or 'Oregon'. He survived the Great Depression, watched WWII, made enough money selling hardware to set himself up as an independent realtor, before that was fashionable. How Grandpa showed affection and care was not the way that you or I would, not until late in his life. He preferred the casual insult or the dutch rub to the head, and I never heard him say "I love you" until I was in my 20s.
I am not grieving the loss, as it was expected, and though it sounds unusual, what sorrow exists is mixed with an equal measure of relief, leaving me oddly neutral. However, I do have regrets. Only in the past few years had Grandpa Max tried reaching out to me as a fellow adult. Sharing his interests and hobbies with the 'normal one' brought us a little closer together, in a way that he could show how he cared about you, without actually saying it. I enjoyed the times we could actually talk (when he had his hearing aids turned on) about woodcarving, or the figures of myth.
With all that has gone on in the past few years, I have had little time to stay regularly in touch with him. A letter once or twice a year, an appropriate Christmas gift. We would disagree about some things, we would agree on others, all the while I was learning from him. I couldn't always tell you that I learned anything useful, but rather I learned something about Grandpa, and what made him who he was.
So, no, I am not sad about his death, except that I regret the opportunities lost, to have made his last few years a little richer, and perhaps a little more interesting, by reaching out to him as he had to me.
Farewell, Max. You may have been a hard bastard, but never let it be said that you didn't care.
