After a short life of struggle and success, poverty and excess; an acute myocardial infarction at age forty-two, a severe case of hypochondria, a genetic disposition toward schizophrenia, and a physician/friend who openly pushed prescriptions found Grandpa spending most his remaining twenty-five years huddled in the massively oversized master bedroom of his massively oversized house, like a bear in a cave that’s missed twenty-four cues for Spring.
The first seventeen years I knew him, he lay on his left side, frozen. C-SPAN played as constant background sound in a music less life. An unhappy marriage was periodically interrupted by grandchildren on holidays, which came to gawk and hear entirely inappropriate, pill-induced memories:
· Of being beaten at the dinner table by his French-Canadian Papa because he forgot the French phrase for “Please pass the pepper;”
· Of the three months all the neighborhood kids devoted to collecting parts to create one shared bicycle;
· Of the trains he and other children chased in the dark years of his youth, gathering fallen coal as if it were treasured candy or coins;
· Of his previously hidden shotgun marriage to Grandma, a girl from the right side of those same tracks;
· Of working 60-hour weeks, losing half of his homemade business, then working 70-hour weeks to nurse it back to health, like a boy refusing to give up on his sick dog;
· Of bowling a perfect 300 “before it was easy;”
· And always of the invisible pain that existed in the left side of his stomach, or more likely in his head, no matter how many experimental, exploratory surgeries he underwent. Had some mutant animal burrowed into his organs to slowly gnaw them away for sustenance? Or maybe twenty years of lying in that same statue position, rolled on his left side, jumbled those organs.
But, in that last year, something changed. He sobered up and called long-lost children and grandchildren who he’d written off years prior, to chat and dispense little bits of advice like medicine. He suddenly knew answers to questions about love and homemade remedies to battle depression. He tried to flirt and laugh with Grandma, as he had once when they were young. For some of his family, this change took too long, but others were pleased to have him. Though he constantly clutched the immense gut that hung over his sweatpants, he began to leave the cave. I’ll always remember him as the man who’d show up randomly at his grandchildren’s doors, bearing an odd array of presents like toilet paper, mustard, socks, pickles and vanilla ice cream, pretending Kroger sales prompted the visit.
