Midnight with Grandpa

This is a moment I’ll remember.

It’s just after midnight Pennsylvania time, but my body is still set to Colorado’s. Everyone else has gone to bed, including Grandpa, whose bed is out in their living room. He’s beside me and every few seconds, his arms and legs kick and jerk. His head is where it’s been for months: Falling hard to the right.

Sometimes I think he’s woken up and is reaching for something, but when I look over, it’s just the Parkinson’s dragging his hand down to his thigh slowly, then quickly pulling it back up.

Parkinson’s is absolutely a demon.

On the TV, a young(ish) Jimmy Swaggart is muted, but he’s preaching and singing and sweating. Especially sweating. It’s his pre-scandal era and he’s preaching the gospel (I’m assuming…no subtitles) like there’s no tomorrow and as a pre-millennialist, he really thinks there may NOT be a tomorrow!

Grandpa’s constant twitching makes the young, fit me tired, just thinking about it. He hasn’t stopped since I arrived, and he won’t stop until the end.

Please, God, let his bones rest.
Let him find Your goodness in the land of the living.
Well, one or the other.

There seems to be an element of the disease that takes the human apart piece by piece and replaces him with this quivering body, and at some point, you’re supposed to realize, this isn’t him anymore…this isn’t my grandpa, like some sort of sick game. And I’m wondering if we’ve past that point and need to realize it.

Because every now and then, grandpa has a quick quip, some flash of the hilarious man he was, but for the most part he mumbles incoherently, sleeps, or talks about the naked people on the roof of his neighbor’s house out the window who no one else can see.

–

Next day, saying goodbye, I kissed him on his cheek which was bristly. He hadn’t been shaved in a few days. Dandruff fell generously from his thin hair. Supposedly hair keeps growing for a week after you die.

I felt the urge to say something significant as I said goodbye, but the only things I could think of were a jumbled: “Goodbye, I’ll see you later [which I really tripped over, realizing that I probably won’t], and I love you.”

What else are you supposed to say?
What are the words that can once and for all seal in the life of a human being, and your relationship with them?

“Good job, you did it.” ??
What?

There are no right words.

There is mainly the memory of the sensation of his rough whiskers on my lips as I kissed him on the cheek and then stood to leave. There are only the first 33 years of my life, through which he was an ever-present loving grandpa, sending his support from Pennsylvania.

[Insert some cliché about how those 33 years matter more than the final minutes.]

–

On my way to the airport, my parents drove me past the facility where he will be moved to tomorrow. It’s atop a pleasant green hill: a nice old red brick building that used to be an orphanage. Ironically, over the entrance, it read ODD FELLOWS OF HARRISBURG. Seems fitting for my goofy old grandpa. I think he’d appreciate holing up with his fellow Odd Fellows.

My dad pointed out the window of his room, which faced the airport, and from it you can see the planes coming and going. Not a bad place for one’s world to end: watching the rest of it coming and going in a busy and infinite wheel of commotion.

It reminded me that death is quiet.

The closer one gets to death, the more your world winds down. It’s quieter and stiller.

Naturally, people often draw near to death with screams or flames or violence, but in the aftermath, everything is still and silent. It’s ironic to me that death metal is a genre, as death is nothing but silence and stillness. It should be called life metal, as life is energetic and vibrant and screaming to be witnessed.

And people whose hands work with death are normally more quiet as well. 
I haven’t met a class clown who became an undertaker.

e

100 days of blogs, day 7.