The cut off date

by zacharyburkhart

My grandfather died.  Three weeks in the nursing home.  Two months of known cancer.  Closer to two years of suspected cancer.  Five years of CHF.  88 years old.  The numbers are the hard part.  I have one grandparent left, my mom’s mom.  When she dies that’s a generation concluded, the pages in their history stop there.  I know little to nothing about my great grandparents.  That is why this is important.  I know my grandfather’s mother would always pick me up and not put me down until she left, that she’d exercise every morning well into her 80’s, that she traveled the world.  I know my grandfather’s dad died young.  Thirty five years old, fell over in the the fields of his farm and was done.  I know my other grandfather’s dad was a water dowser.  He hunted water and dug wells.  I don’t know anything about his wife.  We don’t know anything about my other grandmother’s parents.

My mom’s dad, we watched him die for decades.  He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when he was forty and then went quickly after some surgical complications.  My Dad’s mom fought cancer brilliantly and left this world more elegantly than I thought we are allowed.  These two passings were okay to get through.  My Dad’s dad was another story.

When the doctor said six months, it all got worse.  For four years we were under the idea that some hidden heart attack would bop him off out of the blue.  He had two unfixed blockages and didn’t want to die on the table so he just wanted to ride out the time he had.  He made it expressly clear when he had my dad write up his do-not-resuscitate papers.

I was okay with the heart disease.  I was okay with the randomness of life.  When the doctor made my grandfather start down that time line, it got harder.  The night we got the official diagnosis, I stayed up reading Lucille Clifton.  Breast cancer got her.  It isn’t that it suddenly got real, or that there were new emotions that weren’t there before, it was just the knowledge of how much he had to spend, how much life he could afford.  At least for me, the haze was gone and then there wasn’t any doubt.  I’m okay with not knowing.  I’m sure some of that might be denial, but I’m also sure probably not very much of it.

So we watched him grow thin.  I said my good byes two days before he died.  Anyways, not sure what point I was getting to in the end.  But again, anyways, my grandfather died.