Rest In Peace

I just found out that my grampa died. Ever since Gram died, Grampa has lived at a nursing home in Louisville. When my aunt Sharon called to tell me that Grampa was gone, the only thing I felt was confusion – mostly because I didn't have many other emotions surrounding his passing.

There are so many phrases that people fill the air with when someone dies. We want to be able to assign meaning to something that is beyond our control and usually, beyond our capability to understand so we say things like, "He's in a better place." "Her suffering is over." "God has another new angel today." What do those things really mean?

The only phrase that I can come up with that resonates at all with my Grampa's life, at least as I knew it, is "rest in peace."

My Grampa was a complicated man. When I was younger I heard stories from my father about how his father was gone for weeks at a time, driving truck all over the United States. My dad and his brothers were mostly raised by their mother. By the time I remember my grandfather, he and my father owned a moving company together in Lexington, KY. Grampa was gruff. Opinionated. Loud. Stubborn. Often angry.

When I was young I remember that on many rides home in the car, after spending an evening at Gram and Gramp's house, my mother would be unhappy. She disliked hearing my Grampa arguing politics with anyone who would listen. He was relentless in trying to pull you into "discussions" and giving you his perspective on whatever the topic was that evening.

I never felt particularly close to Gramp. His roughness scared me. There was an annual butchering day on the farm and every year Grampa would bring the cow tongue into the kitchen in a bucket full of blood. I was already unsettled from hearing the gunshots that put the cow down and then Grampa would insist that I touch the cow's tongue and feel the sandpapery taste buds.

As I got older, I got used to Grampa's abrasiveness. When Gramma would write me letters in college there would always be a paragraph or two in Grampa's thin, nearly unreadable writing. When I went to visit I would often hear the same stories that I had heard many times before. As he aged, this became more and more pronounced. He talked endlessly about routes he had taken across the US in his truck. About cafes, waitresses and weather patterns in any city you could name. What seemed superficial to us was simply his way of connecting.

Over the last few years I've learned things about my Grampa that explain a lot. Like most of us, events shaped and molded him in both positive and negative ways. As a young teen his father shot and killed himself. My Grampa was the one to find his body. Naturally, he grew up in many, many ways in that moment. Who helped him figure all those feelings out? Who mentored him and taught him how to handle anger and resentment and guilt and all the other feelings that come with suicide? I have no idea. Maybe no one.

I have no doubt that he loved my Gramma and their family, even if he didn't know how to to show it very well. For all the nagging, bellowing and bickering there were equal amounts of laughter and good natured ribbing. Even though it was never outwardly apparent, I'm also quite sure that he loved his grandkids and was quite proud of all of our accomplishments. The first thing he did when you went home to visit in the last few years was to show you pictures of the grand- and great-grandkids and tell you what they had been up to lately.

Perhaps the reason that the phrase "rest in peace" resonates for me is that the one word I would use to describe my grandfather was "restless." I have a particular aural memory of Gramp. Just as I regularly hear my Gramma's laughter, I can still hear the whispering sound my Grampa made with his hands. Even as he fell asleep in his big red leather chair in front of the television at night, he was restless. His index fingers circled is thumbs endlessly making the dry, hardworking skin of those two fingers create a whispering sound that only stopped when he was truly asleep. It's a sound I occasionally catch myself making when I am especially agitated.

From the time that my Grampa entered the nursing home after my Gramma's death in September, until just about a week ago, he never mentioned his wife to the staff at the home. They had been married 68 years. It was only in the last week, as he stopped eating and slipped closer and closer to death that he began to see her in his dreams.

He talked and perhaps she answered.

Rest in peace Grampa. I loved you.

This is the best picture of my grandparents that I have. It cracks me up to look at their color choices for a joint portrait. . .but it's a perfect reflection of their personalities! It's fitting that their funerals will be together. We're all going to Rice Lake, Wisconsin the last week of July to celebrate their lives and have something of a family reunion on the lake.