So it goes. Feel free not to read this.
My grandpa passed away. I haven't cried yet, and I'm not sure I will until I get home, both because it won't seem wholly real until I'm in his house and he's not there, and because this has never happened to me and I don't know how to grieve. I wish I could be with my family right now. This throws into sharp relief how much of a person is contained in the way they talk, the way they walk, their physicality and presence. All I find myself wanting to do is talk about his life, because it was so amazing and I'm afraid to forget the details of it. I was the first grandchild, and was lucky enough to get to live with him for some time on the ranch, that dreamland of golden fields and gnarled oaks. He seriously had this gift for telling stories that was almost bard-like, pauses and intonations at all the right moments, this leisurely pace that hooked me in. He taught me how to swim, and he told me stories in the way he has: his first car, how he and my grandma met, when he learned to dance, when he was running from the FBI (this was one hell of a story), what he was like in school, and some stories about the navy although we never really got into that too much. Sometimes he and my grandma would sing. He had a tattoo of a black cat above a number 13. He went from hunting through garbage cans and shooting birds in Kansas to buying property out west and becoming a real estate mogul that sent his kids to college and set them up their own businesses, and afforded us all these lavish vacations after. Sometimes he'd lord over the kids and grandkids with money, sometimes he'd be unspeakable generous, sometimes he'd be determined to exile an in-law and run a crack down the already tenuous bonds of goodwill in our family, sometimes he'd take new members under his wing and help them set up a new business, or help them feel like they really had a stake in life, and a way to support their own families. Sometimes he was there with advice that could only be given by someone who's been everywhere and done everything, and sometimes he'd be almost cruelly pessimistic. I've heard him called "a great man" and "evil." The good at the bad and everything in-between, two sides of the same coin. I will miss him so much. I always got the feeling that he knew so much more than I did, than all of us, and one of the reasons he was so quiet sometimes was because he was just watching us all, and marveling that we had everything without having to work for it in the same way he did, that he had given that opportunity to us, but that we'd never really understand each other. I wish I could be there for my mom and my grandma, but all I can really do now is phone calls, to sound calm and collected on the phone. How did he do it? He trusted so much in our family, even when things were awful. For the longest time I didn't even feel part of that family. I still don't in a way, partly because I'm too afraid of the damage it could do and because, ideologically, I just don't fit in at all. What is this all? Where did he go?