A Farewell To My Grandfather

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.