My grandfather died last weekend. He had a stroke the
previous Friday and died on Sunday. Last week our family traveled back to Ohio
to attend his funeral. After the funeral we went to my uncle’s house and reminisced
as we looked through my grandfather’s photo albums. I very much loved my grandfather.
I have not seen him very many times since we moved to Chicago, but I have made
it a point to call him at least once a month, just to say hello and tell him
that I am thinking of him. When I was a kid I would see him all the time. He
would give me piggyback rides and take me for ice cream. My father says that when
I was very young, he would read to me.
I remember a year or two ago my grandfather talked with me
about how a person’s life has a lot of different chapters, and he was living
his final chapter. He said that I would remember him as this old man, but that he
was not always old. I think he had waiting to tell me those things then because
they were things that he wanted me to know, and he figured I might finally be
old enough to understand.
Looking at my grandfather’s old photo albums was truly
fascinating. Many of the pictures I had seen before at some time. There was one
picture I saw last week that my grandfather first showed me four or five years
ago. The picture has him as a boy standing on a sidewalk next to his bike. There
was another boy in the photo too. It was obvious that they were friends. The
two were looking at the camera and smiling, but I had this weird feeling that
they were trying not to make funny faces. I remember that my grandfather not
only remembered the name of the other boy, but he even told me a couple of the
stories involving him and the other boy, stories that took place 70 years ago. I
remember thinking that it was pretty cool; some old guy remembering so vividly both
his childhood, and his childhood friend.
There were other photos I saw last week that I had
previously seen. A couple of these photos were of my grandfather when he was about
18 or 19. The quality of the black and white pictures was not very good but my
grandfather looked very handsome. He could have been some college student of today
except for the fact that he was pretty dirty, and he was in an army uniform in
the Korean War. My grandfather would talk freely about his childhood, but he
would barely mention the Korean War. I never asked him about that period, but
my father did. I guess my grandfather just did not want to talk about it.
Last week I saw my grandfather’s wedding photos for the very
first time. They were married in 1956. There was a photo of my grandparents haphazardly
feeding each other crumbling wedding cake. There’s a picture of them laughing and getting into
some 1950s car with “JUST MARRIED” half visible on the back window. They were
so young, so happy. It’s hard to believe that they are both gone now.
Perhaps my favorite photo in the albums is a photo of my 11
year-old father posing for the picture while perched on his bike. In the
background is my grandfather sitting on some porch steps, smiling, a cigarette
hanging from his mouth. I think the photo was from 1969. It looked so much like
the photo of my grandfather with his bicycle, it was a little bit disturbing, and
a kind of cool too; two generations yet nearly the identical picture.
A few years before my grandfather died he told me that a
person’s life has a number of chapters, and I will remember only the final
chapter of his life, the chapter when he was an old man. He was wrong about
that. I will remember all of his life’s chapters. To me, my grandfather was that special.
