In Memory of My Grandfather

By Gabe Anderson

Memories, like muscles, tend to atrophy with neglect. They need exercise, or they deflate and disappear. But memories are also weighty, unwieldy things, so it's best if they're shared, and I'd like to share these memories with you. Of all people, my grandfather deserves to be remembered. As I write, he died 17 years ago, almost to the day.

He told me many stories about his life throughout my life. It seemed like every story he told was about a different job he had--I couldn't count them all, let alone remember. At times, he was the child in the story, working in abject poverty in the cotton fields of his native Georgia. Then he would be an adolescent working in a butcher shop, at one point defending himself against an attack wielding his butcher knife. Then, he appeared as a young man registering for service in the Air Force, remembering the deaths of several friends and family members in World War II. Later, he was a Master Sergeant, stepping away from his desk, deciding to live out his retirement as a poultry farmer somewhere in the high plateaus of Wyoming or under the boundless skies of Montana. He told me these stories (never in any sort of order) in his Georgian, Southern accent--an accent he never lost despite leaving home in his teen years and living everywhere from Okinawa, Japan, to the corn fields of Illinois, the monuments of Washington, DC, and at last the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Some of the stories were unforgettable. His father, tormented by poverty exacerbated by the Great Depression, was an alcoholic and an abusive, violent drunk. One day, when he was still a teenager, he returned home to find his father, who, in a drunken rage, was chasing his mother through the house with a knife. He tackled his father, wrestled the knife from his hand, and held him in a headlock. In surprising honesty, he told me that he was afraid he might have to kill him (or at least that thin wisp of a man who was trying to find his lost humanity in the bottom of a bottle). That feeling didn't last long, he told me. After a moment, his father, gasping in the lock, pleaded through tears, "Please, Hoyle, let me go!" He left home not long after that.

That was one of the stories he saved until I was old enough to hear it. There was no moral offered at the end of the story--there never was. Like any good writer or storyteller, he knew that a story well told was best left to the reader's conclusions. It worked. I learned two things: first, to fear the bottle, and second, that cruelty is not a genetic inevitability. While it is often borne from broken family to broken family, the trend itself can be broken. My grandfather wrestled cruelty from his family's history the way he wrestled the knife from his father's hand that day. He taught me that kindness, decency, and altruism were always possible--no matter what you've endured or where you came from. Like that Southern accent, through all the trials of a life that began in a shack during the Great Depression, kindness was a trait he never lost.

He taught me to be a teacher. Under different circumstances, he would have made a great teacher. Whether I was a child, an adolescent, or a young man, he spoke to me in a way that honored the maturity I would someday earn, the intelligence I would eventually discover, and the autonomy I longed for. In other words, he spoke to me as he would any other person he respected. His tone rarely changed whether speaking with a child or an adult. That's what a good teacher does--they acknowledge and respect the humanity of those they teach. I learned that first from my grandfather.

These big intrinsic lessons were the underlying reality of all the other smaller things he taught me--practical things like cooking, gardening, and conversation. He taught me to sing and that it's okay to treat life like a musical--moving through his home singing, without a hint of inhibition, old country story-songs by Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins, Hank Williams, and the like. Whenever I create a mental picture of him, he's cooking and singing.

My strongest memories of him are the most recent. When I would visit him in his home on the slope of Lookout Mountain in Golden, Colorado, we would mainly talk about three things: raising poultry, ranch land for sale in Montana and Wyoming, and the pulp Western novel he wanted to write. There was always a McMurray Hatchery poultry catalog on his table.  He'd show me pictures of the pheasants, chickens, ducks, and guinea hens he planned to raise. We'd talk about land he found for sale, pointing out the circled entries in the classified section of the Denver Post. And he would outline chapters of his very promising Western for me as though it were already written.

It was like this for nearly a decade. Over and over, he invited me into the world of the things he would someday do. They were so real and vivid when he enthusiastically described them that they felt like forgone conclusions--certainties that would come as surely as the changing of the seasons.  I didn't ever really notice that, for all of his planning, he never got any closer to his hen houses on the Wyoming prairie or tucked up under the vast horizon of Montana. When you're dreaming vividly, you don't notice that you're lying somewhere, immobile, in the real world.

In his late seventies, he got sick. A visit to the doctor became a referral to one specialist and then another. Finally, he learned that he had an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma--a cancer of the lymphatic system. Treatments didn't seem to slow down the progression of the disease. Eventually, his body began to swell with so much excess fluid that he needed pints drained on a regular basis. As the months progressed, standing and walking became difficult.  Then the singing stopped. Eventually, sitting became too much of a task, and a hospital bed was placed next to the window in his home office.

Have you ever watched a loved one dying? It's a strange process that feels, somehow, unreal. It's like they're being disassembled piece by piece. My grandfather was always a big man in my memory--strong and full of intelligence and vitality. Every visit to that bedside, I noticed something else missing.  Now, he could not talk; now, he could not eat or drink; now, he slept most of the time. This man who was once so full of life and dreams was deflating like a balloon before my eyes. In the end, he looked more like a sick child than the man who sang with me and taught me about kindness, service, and respect.

My last visit to him was the day before he died. I hope you'll forgive me if I say that I wondered why I was even there. By that point, he was never (at least noticeably) conscious. His breathing was irregular and labored. He was gray, his skin almost translucent.

My turn to say goodbye came.

I took his hand; it was cold and didn't respond to my touch. When was the last time I held his hand? I thought to myself.  I must have been a child of five or six. What do you say to someone when you're not sure they can hear you, and you know that it might be the last thing you ever say to them? I was at a loss for words. Under the weight of silence, I took a moment and looked around the room. As my eyes wandered, looking but not seeing, something stopped them on their aimless journey. A moment more, and the thing came into focus. On a table beside the bed, I saw the cover of the latest McMurray Hatchery catalog--a bright pheasant decorating the otherwise beige room. Besides the catalog, under a cup and some papers, was the classified section of the newspaper, open to land for sale. I looked across the room at the computer where he labored to write a single chapter of his unfinished novel. My heart broke, and after a moment, I realized that this man who had taught me so much throughout my life had a final lesson to teach me--maybe his greatest lesson.

I decided at that moment that if I wanted something or believed in something, it would not be enough to dream and plan and wait for the right moment that may never come. Life is fragile, fleeting, uncertain. I would live in the moment and take action; I would risk failure, knowing that even if I failed, I failed boldly, staving off regret in the effort.

I've heard it said that regret is the strongest emotion. I hope my grandfather, who lived so much life in his 77 years, did not experience regret in those final moments. More than anyone I know, he deserved to live his dreams--such reasonable dreams! The least I could do now was to live mine in his memory. "Thank you, Papa," I said, finally breaking the silence.

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Gabe Andersen is a teacher and writer located in Houston, Texas.