There are things you don't talk about

I don't feel right using facebook to share about personal tragedy or loss, and my family is intensely private. Still, I wanted to keep these pictures somewhere, so I could remember the humbling events of yesterday and all that it meant. Here seems like an intimate-enough space.

I keep circling around how to articulate all the deaths this last year to myself, how to talk or write about them, and if I even should. There are so many layers of complication, loss, and identity. My family is such a strange, fierce, complex beast, and we lost our head, our commander. Putting him to rest at Arlington, I didn't feel like reminiscing about my childhood memories of special times with him or his life as it related to me: how he thought my fingers were so long and beautiful, and that I should have been a pianist like he was, or how he would take me on adventures, or how he was always telling me, "Keep up the good work"--not so much as a compliment for work I had done well, but a reminder that good work is what one should always be doing, and that one's work is never, ever finished. Except, I suppose, in the end.

The thing that feels strangest during this stage of the long series of events set in motion by his passing is this: my fixation on the person he was. For the last 5-7 years, my grandfather suffered a strange, rare malady related to his exposure to agent orange in Vietnam where he slowly lost functions like walking or eating. The first thing that he lost (and his only symptom for a long time) was his ability to make himself understood. Though he remained very cognitively sharp and physically strong otherwise, he was essentially mute. The person I grew up with was trapped inside his own head for much of my adult years, and it seemed to change him, to soften him, make him more emotionally expressive. (Certainly a better listener.) But now that he's gone, it's like I forgot entirely about those end years where he was quiet and humming and kind. I miss so keenly the man that he was before: the loud asshole.

My grandfather liked me; I could tell, the same way I could tell that my own father was his favorite of his four children: firstborn son, football star, magazine model, immediately settling down and starting his own business, a family with two blond-headed grandkids within a few blocks from the family home to boot. That said, I don't think my cousins or his other children always experienced the same golden favor as I probably took for granted. My grandfather was a tank commander, a war hero, a man to whom the word "valor" could be genuinely applied (and was, by the US military.) He could be ruthless, though he never spoke about the war. (He did speak about how when my great-grandfather, his father, would come home, drunk and looking to beat on my great grandmother, he and his brothers would lie in ambush and beat him unconscious so he couldn't hurt her.) Before the war, he was a professional baseball player for the Red Socks. He was funny and mean. He could be scornful. He treated the scent of weakness the way a shark will hit on a blood drop in salt water. He cheated outrageously at cards, a way I learned directly from him. He grew hybrid tea roses and was arrogantly proud of them; his favorite was the Peace rose: a creamy little pink number with a soft flush of gold in the center. He loved my grandmother and her perfect Jackie-O beauty and did almost nothing to make her life easy. He was ordained by the Catholic church to give communion, and would go to houses of the people of his church in hospice and administer last communion. His favorite word was bullshit.