The Case of the Disappearing Grandfather

I have a crappy memory. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I have a selectively crappy memory. I can remember the year Jane Austen’s last novel was published (Persuasion, 1817), but I cannot remember what I did last weekend. I can recite the first 16 lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which I had to memorize for one of my college classes, but I cannot remember my college graduation. I remember exactly where I was and exactly how I felt when I found out my Dad passed away suddenly, but I do not remember what anyone said at his funeral. When I do remember something, it is either completely random, or it was an incredibly profound or impactful experience. This is not the story of one of the profound experiences.

I grew up visiting my grandfather at his lake house in Wisconsin. In the middle of a lot surrounded by pine trees, raspberry bushes, and grass that had a terrible time trying to grow in soil that was more sand than anything, sat his two-story house. With its plain white exterior, and interior filled to the brim with knick-knacks, it was, by far, the coolest house ever, mostly because at the back of the lot, down a small sand-covered hill, was a dock with not one, but two boats attached. Spending a few weeks there every summer, swimming and boating, playing pool in the basement, eating ice cream every night (because at Grandpa’s house that was allowed) was a highlight of my childhood. But we weren’t in that house at the time this story happened.

I honestly cannot remember how old I was, except that I was in high school. My grandfather had recently had a stroke and was living with us, in my normal, boring, 3-bedroom ranch-style house where I grew up, from the age of four until I moved out after college. Grandpa had been given one of the three bedrooms on the first floor, displacing two of my four brothers into the basement for the duration of his stay. I kept my bedroom, a perk afforded to me because I was the only daughter and a teenager. Grandpa’s room was across the hall from mine, painted blue with a giant Fat Head sticker on the wall featuring one of the Green Bay Packers. We shared the bathroom that sat right in the middle of the hallway that connected our two rooms.

I remember it was springtime, a Sunday morning sometime around Easter. I only remember that because I know if had been any later in the year, it would have been blazing hot and oppressively humid outside, and I distinctly remember it being only mildly hot and a little humid. There was probably a breeze. My family had attended church that morning. We had piled all eight of us, Mom and Dad, Grandpa, and the five kids, into my Mom’s full-size blue and silver van. It was tall enough you had to climb a bit to get into the back, and us kids always fought over who got to sit in the middle captain’s seats. No one wanted to sit on the bench all the way in the back, because then you had to share your space. In the captain’s seats, you didn’t have to share and you had armrests. It was a luxury to a kid in a large middle-class family that was used to squeezing as many people as possible into the smallest affordable space. With Grandpa in tow, though, the middle seat options were down to one, because no one was going to make Grandpa, who just had a stroke, climb all the way into the back and squish onto a seat with three kids. Fights over the other seat were common, as was Mom and Dad breaking up our petty sibling squabbles and reminding us that it was Sunday—the Lord’s Day—and God didn’t like it when we yelled and hit each other. Sometimes this argument worked. Other times, it took the threat of not going out for breakfast to get us to leave each other alone.

That day, squabbles for the open middle seat had long since passed, and church was almost over. I grew up Catholic, so the services were usually around an hour, and toward the end, anyone who had gone through the sacrament of First Communion was invited to process forward in a solemn line to receive the “body and blood of Christ,” a.k.a., a little stale cracker and some watered down Manischewitz. Upon returning to our pew, blessedly near the back of the Church, we all resumed kneeling until the sacrament was finished and we were signaled to return to our seats. As we moved to sit, a slow whisper started making its way down the line of siblings.

Where is Grandpa? One of my brothers mouthed to me.

We all looked around, checking in the pews in front and behind us. Because I was sitting near the end, I got up and walked to the very back of the church, near the doors, looking to see if he had ducked into a bathroom or vestibule. He was nowhere to be found. I returned to the pew and my siblings once again played telephone to the pass the message back up the line to my parents. Mild panic set in as we all realized that Grandpa had wandered off, and we had no idea where he had gone. Signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually take his mind would not set in for a few years yet, so while we had no reason to believe he had forgotten where he was or why he was there, it was still worrying that my 70-something, just-had-a-stroke Grandpa had left without saying a word and was nowhere to be seen. Even though on most Sundays, Mom and Dad would not dream of leaving before the final blessing, this was enough of a concern that they quietly shepherded five kids out the back and we set off to search outside.

Half of us walked slowly toward the parking lot, looking around as we walked, while the others went to circle the building, searching for any sign of a lost old man. I was in the go-to-the-van group. As my mom and I got closer, we noticed his shadow through the slightly tinted windows. As a 6’2”, broad-shouldered, bald man, his silhouette was distinctive. There was no doubt it was Grandpa. I slid the side door open.

“Grandpa?” I asked timidly. He turned his hazel eyes to my brown, but said nothing. “What are you doing out here?”

He huffed, a small exhale of derision.

“I gave God my hour,” he responded gruffly, and turned away.

“Dad…,” I heard my mom start to say, but I was too caught up in the humor of it all to listen. My grandpa, who had only converted to Catholicism because he married my Grandma, had left church as soon as the service hit one hour, and came outside to wait for the rest of us. According to him, God got one hour of church a week, and whether the priest finished within that hour or not was not his concern.

The memory of that day comes back to me now in sensory flashes. The brightness of the sun in my eyes as I walked to the car, the slow humidity of the burgeoning warm weather, the sound of my Grandpa’s voice with its slight gravel earned through years in the military, the brief tremor of fear when I worried he may have gotten lost. In the long list of important moments in my life, this probably would not make the top 10. For some reason, though, it is a core memory of my grandfather. In a way, I suppose it epitomizes his general no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to life. It also marks the first of several strokes he had, and his cognitive and physical abilities decreased with each one. Now that I think back on this day, it is likely one of the last memories I have of my grandpa when he was still truly himself, before age and disease started stealing the brave, funny, caring man I knew as a child. After that first stroke, the man who held me on his shoulders, who taught me to drive a boat, who took me raspberry picking every summer, slowly slipped away with each passing year, until the day he no longer recognized me. But that day? That not-quite-summer day was filled with the love and humor I had always felt around him. It may not be a particularly profound memory of a big event or a day that defined the course of my life, but the feelings it stirs, the warmth and love and bittersweet loss that I feel when I think of my grandpa, are branded onto my soul, as sure and steady as a heartbeat.

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