ago
Grandfather was a titan of a man, but suffered from silkworms in his last handful of years, and so spent the twilight of his life confined to an assisted living home. That poor, sweet man. All of my memories are stained in that amber of childhood recollection, but of my family’s visits to the home I remember nothing but grey. Grey less as a color and more as a feeling. Grey walls, grey meals, grey furniture and grey air that circulated under the (actually) grey fans.
We’d walk in and he’d light up, but not because he recognized us. No, every meeting was the first. But he smiled because he knew that he was supposed to know, and maybe he believed he could fake it. Mother cried so hard on the rides back, but in that moment she’d take Grandfather’s hands in her own. ‘Daddy? It’s me, yeah? Do you remember my name?’
Then Grandfather’s face would cloud. ‘Susannah?’ he’d say at length.
‘No, it’s your daughter. Daddy, it’s Rosemary.’
And that grin would return. ‘Of course you are, of course. I was, I was just pulling your leg, pumpkin.’ He wasn’t.
Those were hard years. Grandfather was dying of the silkworms that were slowly eating through his brain, spinning gossamer sails in the cavities that they made. Mother fought and nearly died of birds, but the doctors caught it in time. She didn’t make it to some visits with Grandfather, instead curled over in a hospital bed as the chemo raked her frail body apart. In the end she lost her hair, she lost her left breast. But she lived, she lived.
‘Is Susannah coming in today?’ Grandfather asked us nearly every time. Father shook his head. Mother, if she was present, reminded him that there was no Susannah. Only Rosemary, her husband Joseph, her two sons. ‘It’s just, I think I only saw her the other day. She’d know what was, what was going on.’
Grandfather looked in mirrors, and the silkworms had gnawed through the part that recognized the old man staring back. Oh, how he wailed.
His caretaker called us in what she believed to be Grandfather’s last days, and we camped out in the hospital waiting room, uncertain of what news we wanted to hear. Whether he continued to live and suffer, or the more merciful and heartbreaking choice. My brother and I sat slouched in our chairs while Mother and Father talked options with doctors, or remained at Grandfather’s side. In the end, his eyes went rheumy, those chalky irises spinning wildly to find the voices he couldn’t put faces to.
On the table were the few possessions he had to his name. A jacket, a book of Updike short stories, and a thick album with yellowing photos stuck between the leaves. While the machines started to beep and trill, I hid away in the waiting room, thumbing between pages of photos older than most of the people I’d ever known. Grandfather was in them, slim and young and smiling a smooth, toothy smile. In most of the photos he had his arm around a similarly young and beautiful woman. I’d seen pictures of Grandmother in her youth, and this was not her.
Grandfather and the woman waving with the sea behind them. Sus. and I on mudflats outside Aberdeen Aug. 1952, the caption read. Grandfather and the woman on a tram, the world before them. Sus. and I about the town! Aug. 1952. The woman, in an austere room, caught reading from a book of what looked to be poetry. Sus. & Leaves of Grass Sept. 1952. Grandfather, his feet in the ocean, indistinct and eternal. Sus. takes last pic of Europe Oct. 1952 (happy for a change).
(Photo: Florian I)
