Part 1. This is a lamentation
Ten years ago, my grandfather died, which kicked off the worst decade of my life.
I try not to put anything personal on here because I know mentioning the smallest detail can end in some creep clicking through pictures of the inside of your house on zillow (it’s me, I’ve been the creep) and also because I hate the feeling of being vulnerable.
I have lately felt that I had to record this somewhere, though, so here is a recap of my last ten years. This part might be painful for loved ones to read, so strangers only.
All my life, I had understood myself primarily in relation to my relatives; I was a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter. I had a large, close family of which my grandfather was undoubtedly the head. He was most of our favorite person and some of our least favorite, but he held us all together with an iron will.
When my grandfather died, I grieved for him and I grieved for that understanding of myself. I learned, after many lucky years, that you could be a person who was loved in the world and then one day you were loved less. I watched a parent deeply, deeply mourn and felt the impossibility of my own wound closing as long as hers stayed open. That aspect of death hurt me almost as much as the initial loss. When someone you love is in pain, you are also in pain.
A year or two after my grandfather died, my grandmother got sick. If you haven’t cared for someone at the end of life, I wish you ignorance, forever. She was slipping away excruciatingly slowly, in a process that lasted years, but each day was frantic. I would wake up like a gunshot, like I was 45 minutes into a horror movie, body and mind racing, high alert, and I would stay that this all day, whether I was with her or not.
Socialization at this time seemed absurd. My friends were having babies, and I was keenly aware that while they were worrying about sleep and feeding schedules to make sure their children flourished, I was doing the same for someone who would not grow or thrive but only die, the question merely being how quickly and how painfully. Every conversation I had in this time was held with that thought in my head, and it made every word I said feel like a lie.
She died. You expect some relief and at first there is some but then your life regains its old shape and it’s just more loss. I was no longer a granddaughter. A person I loved was gone, and she took with her an identity and a culture. My grandparents were immigrants; my mom still spoke their native language but now to no one.
I remember telling someone that I wanted to get back to living, but I didn’t feel ready to be happy. It had only been two months. I decided to give myself time. A year. I would probably be okay by then. I pinned my hopes on that date: March 2020.
Lockdown was in some ways a blessing to me. In the previous years of constant worry over my grandmother, I had become sick in ways I still don’t fully understand. I thought I’d bounce back once the stress and deep sorrow passed, but that’s not how it worked. Pain stayed my constant companion.
I don’t understand how people write about chronic illness. When I am in pain, there is only pain. There is only bright bright animal pain. When I’m not in pain, I don’t want to think about the times I am. I shrivel at how dramatic I must seem to others, that my risk tolerance for catching an illness is so low, that I ask my loved ones to still mask in public places, but the mere thought of more pain is my undoing. You think you are a person and then pain enters the picture and you realize you are just a body. This is a feeling you can’t unknow, and still now, at the first sign of its coming, I feel myself crumble, all my edges dissolving, the things that I think make me who I am fading, until I am just a plea: I don’t want to feel this way again.
Gradually, I became unreliable. I would make it within blocks of a friend’s house or minutes to an appointment and have to turn around, insensible to anything but my own internal agony, my loved one gripping the steering wheel trying to get us home as quickly as possible, terrorized by my retreat within myself. For a year I couldn’t go down the main street where I live because of a particularly bad incident during a traffic jam.
I had no control over the pain, so I exercised the only agency I could and stayed home. Rather than keep breaking plans, I started saying no. No to seeing your new house. No to going out for drinks. No to travel, certainly, but eventually no to going anywhere more than 20 minutes away. My world became small. The pandemic made that easier, though even then it was so bad that I rescheduled my first COVID vaccine three times, afraid that I wouldn’t make it through the mandatory waiting period at the store.
My understanding of who I was upended itself once again. Relationships strained by the years preoccupied with my grandmother frayed further. Qualities I prided myself on, that I had assumed were innate, no longer seemed to describe me. I had experienced the disorientation of defining myself as a member of a family that no longer existed; now I didn’t know who I was at all. I did not have many good thoughts about myself in this time. A lot of days I still don’t.
I wish I had an inspiring ending to this tale, but I didn’t learn anything or become a better person. I didn’t turn a corner, nothing changed to make me think the next ten years will be different. Some days are better than others. I suppose that’s life.
I put this down here not to complain or depress anyone but because though I try to focus on the good in my life, for once, I need to mark the bad. I need to mark it so I can close the chapter on it. I don’t know if the next decade will be better or worse, but it won’t be this one. That feels worth acknowledging.
Part 2. This is a celebration
Grief is in many ways universal but I lost someone specific, so I want to tell you now about my grandfather. He could be horrible. When he was in a bad mood, everyone was in a bad mood. But he made every room he was in feel alive and I’m still trying to make sense of what that means now that he’s gone.
Talking about my grandfather only brings me joy but this part will be uninteresting for strangers to read, so loved ones only.
He had huge, work-roughened hands. Sandpaper hands, we’d call them as kids, when he’d delight us by rubbing our backs with them. He could crack a walnut with just his palm, slamming it down on the table he made that we all ate at at least once a week. He could peel a grape just by rubbing it on his fingers. At night, he would call his friend who owned a bakery to put in an order for the morning, and his finger would shoot out, unerringly straight, to stab the buttons on the telephone. He knew that if he didn’t hit the one he wanted dead center, he would get two or even three and have to start over.
With these hands, he touched his grandchildren like we were the most precious creatures on earth. As gently as you’d pick up a butterfly, he’d lay a head on our heads. We were his doves, his chicks, his angel girls. We could do no wrong. I generally disdain the cutesy language some people use when they talk about daughters and the male relatives who love them, the type of daddy’s little girl stuff you see on facebook posts by the worst people you went to high school with, so please understand I am being only factual when I tell you: he made me feel like a princess. He made me feel cherished.
To everyone else, he was a terror. He was wickedly funny both in the thrown-off remark and in the long story. Everyone he ever met had a nickname, and not a flattering one, but you could never deny its accuracy. No matter how good a person you thought you were, you’d laugh. What was Alligator Lips’ real name? To this day, I do not know.
His tales from his hometown don’t feel like they could possibly have been real, but he told them so convincingly that maybe they were. He was extraordinary enough that things may have happened to him that would not have to anyone else and a good enough storyteller that I’ll never know for sure. His best stories were told in Italian but he was practiced at pausing at just the right moments to let one of my parents translate, and he would crow out his distinctive laugh when they reached the punchline, pounding a fist on the table for emphasis, everything just as funny to him repeated as it was the first time he said it.
He wouldn’t shut up, ever, not in church, not at funerals, and attempts to shush him only made him louder. He had no indoor voice and didn’t care to explore the concept. My sister developed hearing problems after he died in the ear that faced him at the dinner table, and she tells us she thinks it’s him, still. My high school boyfriend told me once that he had a great voice, a compliment he would have loved but that I was too surprised to pass along. His voice to me was just the background of my everyday. It was not until months after he died, watching an old home movie, that I realized how heavy his accent was. I talked to him so often, heard his voice so frequently, that I didn’t know what it sounded like until death silenced it.
He knew how to do everything. He was an artisan and an artist. He carved heartbreakingly gorgeous religious icons and would do a circuit of the local churches to get them triple blessed. He made most of the furniture I live with and half his house and could figure out any task of engineering or construction. When he was still working, he would call my mom on his lunch break to ask what she needed and within days he would deliver it to her exactly as she had wanted it. Even in his 80s, if he was visiting us, he would be taking out his sandpaper and fixing a swollen door. Still working, still taking care of us.
Maybe because he was so capable, absolutely nothing would convince him not to do something once he got the idea in his head. He took years off my life climbing on the roof at 85 to saw off a jump rope tangled on the power lines with a kitchen knife, years off my sister’s when she walked in on him having moved an enormous china cabinet using only a 2x4 and my diminutive grandmother. Our pleas and fear for his well-being only egged him on. He knew he could do it.
Really, it didn’t take much to egg him on. He was a minor hoodlum, a punk. Even in death, I am afraid to share the details of the various “pranks” (misdemeanors, at least, but I suspect some felonies) that he got a kick out of recounting to us. Some we were there for, like the time he keyed a car at 87 and was caught. There were lots of times he wasn’t. He didn’t care either way; if he had done it, they deserved it.
He was embroiled in so many actively malignant feuds that I could never tell who he was speaking to at the moment, but chances were that if you were blood related but not a child or a grandchild, you were on the outs. Some of these grudges were reconciled eventually; some festered so acutely that when his uncle died, he was banned from the services. He was undeterred, convincing a friend to sneak him into the funeral home so he could pay his respects in secret the night before. This is one of my favorite stories about him. The motivation behind this visit was surely as much a fuck you to the relative trying to keep him out as it was a bedrock belief that he had to do his uncle this last courtesy, and this is the anarchic respect that to me defined his personality.
He’d call, good luck calling him back. He wasn’t home; he was busy. He was feeding the birds at the park, a sack of leftovers so alarmingly generous that to this day I know that if I tell a pigeon who my grandfather was, it would drop the fry out of its mouth to bend a knee and let me pass unimpeded. He was driving up to the woods to forage mushrooms for our holiday dinner; he was in the cellar building something someone needed; he was taking his exercise, brisk shirtless walks at the beach if it was fair or laps at the mall if it was raining. Try the Umi chicken in the food court; the woman who worked there liked him.
Everybody liked him. He was sweet to strangers in a way that was both sincere and a touch mocking, a twinkle in his eye - they think I’m an old man but I know I’m straight in the head, he once told us. He consistently stole the Italian language newspaper at the nearby nursing home and would greet the receptionist who surely suspected him of doing it with elaborate courtesy and cheer, cheer that he felt partly because he was stealing the newspaper at the nursing home and she surely suspected him of doing it. He would take me and my sister to light candles at church, but when they increased the suggested donation amount, he’d put in the old one because come on, that’s enough now. God was important but he’d rather use the money for his family.
He enjoyed his petty thefts and getting one over on people, but he was also incredibly, incredibly generous. He was an intimidating man but a soft touch. He sent so much money back to family in Italy that when he died, a relative told another that the gravy train was over (roughly translated, don’t correct my Italian, mom!). At his funeral, a friend from his hometown came to tell us that when he was a little kid, maybe seven years old, and my grandfather slightly older, a teen, they worked in the same woodshop. My grandfather would take time out of the work to make him little toys, wooden airplanes for him to play with. He had a special place in his heart for kids of all kinds, strangers and ones he knew. I laughed when I found out that he used to give money to my relatives whose mother was perhaps his greatest enemy. Her sins were grave, mortal in his eyes, but kids were kids, always.
With his grandchildren, of course, he was lavish. At every visit, we would get a wad of bills wrapped together with a brand new rubber band, a gift he called “the rent.” He contributed to vacations and bought us the toys our parents wouldn’t. He brought bread, he brought donuts, he brought a trunkful of groceries and meals prepared by my grandmother. He brought us the gift of his attention and care. He would call and leave messages in a mix of Italian and English, mumbled check-ins. “’S only me. Call me back ok bye.” He showed up. He showed up. He showed up.
In Italian (and I’m sure in English, though no Americans learn any grammar), there are two main tenses for the past. There is passato prossimo, which you use to say something happened and now it’s done. He called. She graduated. But there is also the imperfetto tense, which refers to things that happened in the past and kept happening, things that happened a lot and things that may be happening still. I think of this when I think about dinners at my grandparents’ house, how I sat at that table so many times that it felt impossible that there would come a time when I wasn’t anymore. Straining to hear my grandmother across from me as my grandfather bleated in my sister’s ear, a blaring trombone to her light clarinet. So many times I was there that surely I wore a groove in reality. So many times that it feels possible still that I may find a way back there someday.
There are lots of things I wish I had inherited from my grandfather: his incredible head of hair, of which he was justly vain, sure, but also the way he would want to do something and then just do it, the huge enjoyment he took in things, the confidence that let him leave his small town and family behind for a country where he didn’t speak the language.
But I know I did inherit things from him too: the way I make people laugh, my quickness, the way I preside over my loved ones like a mother hen. And I inherited his love, which has shaped me so deeply that even if I’m just a body, just a lump of clay, I know I have his fingerprints on me.
❤️🩹