grandpa
My Grandpa Bill died on Saturday morning after a long fight with cancer. I miss him already.
My mom was over Saturday night and I saw my hospital mug and thought to ask her if she wanted to take it down to him to use and then remembered he was already gone. I keep forgetting.
My mom said that she sat at his house after he was gone and looked at his things. His glasses. His binoculars. His dream catchers. All of his stuff is still here and now we cannot find him.
My family and I went and saw him on Monday to show him my new baby. He said we had stolen her. It’s true. We stole her from heaven.
He got really disoriented at the end.
My cousin Sarah, wrote the following in her blog:
We visited him yesterday and he is so different than he used to be. When I walked in the room, he said, “Now, who is this one?”
“I’m Sarah, grandpa,” I said.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I knew you in a different life!” he said, as calmly as anything. My heart tightened right up into a ball in my throat. The veil is thin for him. He kept saying other various things like that the entire time. He once touched my mom’s hand and said, “Take me to heaven. Heaven is my home.”
Kateka, my sister, wrote about it here.
I keep thinking about him when I was at his house with him one time. I was a few months pregnant and we were watching a disgusting food show about weird foods around the world. The people on the show were eating bull blood and eating bull testicles. I was trying not to throw up. Seriously. He then told me that his dad used to castrate sheep with his teeth. This was totally helping me not throw up.
He was a rancher and a teacher. He knew everything about the world and geography and history. If you had taken a drive with him you would have been entertained by this stories of every place that you passed. In college I told him about a trip I was thinking of taking to Apple Valley, California. He started rattling off places near by that I needed to see. Victorville. The John Wayne Museum. He knew it all.
Another time, a boyfriend had broken up with me and I had to get out of town. He was on a mission in California with is wife Gloria. I went and stayed with them for a week. He and I got up every morning and watched the wild fires burn the Redwood Forests on the news and would go outside and feed the deer apples. One morning he asked me about the boyfriend. I don’t remember what I said, but he said, “I don’t know a lot about love, but I do know about turtles. Turtles will walk past each other in the desert and look each other in the eye to see if they are a good match.” He had his hands in fists acting out the turtle heads. “They will either stay together or will move their heads in opposite directions and keep walking.” This was his version of a pep talk. It really did help though. That boyfriend helped set me up for the life I have now. I am grateful to Grandpa Bill for helping me recognize it.
He was not loud and aggressive with his opinions. But he did teach me about life and to him I am thankful.
December 21st, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I’m so sorry about your grandpa. My grandma is much the same right now and it has been hard to watch. The veil is very thin. She will be 98 in a couple of weeks. Wow. I don’t know if I want to get that old. It doesn’t look too fun. I’m glad you have wonderful memories of your grandpa. He sounds like a neat man.
January 1st, 2010 at 4:17 pm
That was lovely.