“Ok”, I responded and nodded my head.
I feel sad yet relieved. I’m ten and my grandpa is dying, and I don’t know what ten-year olds are supposed to say to their dying grandpas.
When Grandpa Jon was first diagnosed with cancer, I didn’t consider the possibility of death. He would simply go to the doctor and get better, just like he said. Death was something that happened to really old people, like my great grandparents, who I’d been too young to remember.
But he never did get better. My memories of that time are foggy. I remember long drives to the Mayo and dark hospital rooms where Grandpa would be propped up in a hospital bed growing increasingly thinner and unable to talk much. Grandma would often lift a paper Dixie cup to his lips encouraging him to drink water.
At his funeral, I watched grandma kneel over his casket, gently running her hand through the few gray wisps of hair that the chemo hadn’t stolen, tears running down her cheeks. My dad broke down at the kitchen table one morning, his shoulders heaving with quiet sobs. It might be the only time I’ve seen him cry.
“Your grandpa was the glue that held this family together”, my mom said to me and my sister. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without him”.
It’s an unsettling time in a kid’s life when you discover that the adults in your life are people too, full of doubts, fears, and vulnerabilities. My dad wasn’t all that much older than I currently am when his dad passed away. And the older I get, the more I am aware that one day my parents (and my husband’s parents) won’t be here either. Just saying it out loud feels scary. Sometimes, the light will catch their faces a certain way, and I’ll spot new fine lines criss-crossing their skin, a gentle reminder that time is passing.
Without Grandpa Jon at the helm, the Corradi family managed to come together, patching the holes left in grandpa’s absence. One of the most difficult transitions was watching my mom lose her mother to Alzheimers. She told me it was almost like experiencing two deaths. First, the loss of her friend and then, in the end, the loss of her mom. How does one prepare for that? I’ve heard it suggested that, really, you sort of can’t.
I’ve experienced other losses throughout my life. I know that grief often brings with it a time of reflection, thinking about the person you’ve lost and the impact they had on you and those around them. We spend a lot of time at a person’s funeral focusing on their eulogy - what should be said, who should say it, what memories should be included. And while it seems like an important step in the grieving process, in those moments I find myself wishing for more time to say those things when the person was here.
We often poke fun at my mom for telling the same story five or six times in an evening. But I know one day I might find myself sitting at the picnic bench at the lake, yearning for her to come around the corner bundled up in one of Dad’s old mining jackets, full of stories to tell. I love her homemade desserts, her trinkets and crafts. I wonder who I will call if she’s not there to pick up the phone to answer a random question or catch up on the latest small town gossip.
I think about boat rides at the cabin with my dad, watching him tinker in the garage, his homemade deer steak. And then, how comforting it is following the familiar curves of McNiven Road, seeing our reddish brown house on the hill, and spotting dad plowing snow with his impossibly old tractor, or piling wood on the side of the house.
And I think of my in-laws, Diane and Thom, and how they’ve always felt like the living embodiment of the phrase “all are welcome here”. I love arriving at their house and knowing they’ll be waiting for us in the entry with warm hugs and cheerful greetings. Spending time with them feels restorative. It’s a place to relax, have good conversation, and simply enjoy one another’s company (one of the many reasons we’ve dubbed their home “the suburban cabin”). JT and I discuss how much we enjoy just being able to pick up the phone and ask Thom obscure questions like if a non-Catholic should take communion, and then finding ourselves in an hour long conversation about the church and its role in addressing climate change. Or the simple joy of being able to spend a Saturday morning sitting on their couch, sipping coffee, with a plate of Diane’s famous Swedish tea ring.
Our parents have been such a source of stability throughout our lives. It hurts to imagine a time without them. You begin to experience what feels like an oxymoron, a joyful sadness of sorts, knowing how much you love them in the here and now while catching glimpses of the pain you’ll experience with the loss that is yet to come. While they’re all still here, I hope they know what they’ve given us. It is awfully hard to encompass it with words. And impossible to replace them once they go.
While there’s certainly not a shortage of people in the world, as we get older, it feels like there starts to become a shortage of your people. The people you loved, the ones who shaped you, the ones that lived your history alongside you. Death takes us all one by one, leaving those behind with only the moments imagined and times remembered. I like to think that we take the best of these people and weave them throughout our lives, creating a story that begins, ends, and begins again.
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