Remembering my Grandfather

He would have been 83 years old today. He died from complications following a heart attack a week after my brother, whose birthday is June 5th, was born--in 1994, after being in the hospital since my birthday for almost 6 months. I was in my first year of college. He bought me a $50 French dictionary while in the hospital. I was taking French, which he, like my grandmother, spoke fluently from childhood. I had a particularly distinguished and knowledgeable professor--older, I think, than my grandfather--who gave me a recommendation (at my grandfather's request) for a good unabridged French dictionary. A friend found it at the Yale bookstore (in the days shortly before Amazon.com), and though unable to speak for the tubes, he wrote that she should buy two.

I visited him once in the hospital. I went to read to him from Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey, which I had read recently. I was overwhelmed, and had to leave as I grew cold and developed the tunnel-vision that I understand precedes fainting. I promised to return but never had another opportunity to visit.

We shared a love of learning and of books. As the oldest of his grandchildren, he would talk to me about ideas. He admired the Southern Agrarian writers, and found T. S. Eliot because of writers like Alan Tate and Cleanth Brooks. I would learn more about two of these authors after his death. I believe he would have liked to talk with me about Modernism. I believe that he is proud that I will be graduating with a Ph.D. in August. He would have liked to read my dissertation, I think. And though he may not have approved of some of my actions along the way, he would be--is, perhaps--proud of where I am now, with my husband and my children.

He was an important influence on my conversion, albeit posthumously. When I was in high school, he showed me a book that surprised me--about Catholic teaching on sexuality--and told me that he would give it to me to read when I was ready. Unfortunately, I have never read the book, which is packed away now in the house my uncle built for my grandmother after he died so that she would be closer to the family. She is no longer able to live there. If I knew which book it was, I would like to read it now. I remember his desire for me to have that perspective, and, knowing so much more about it now, I have so many questions about that book. I have not thought about it in years.

After he died, years after and for years after, I had dreams--that he was still alive, that he had not really been dead, that he recovered from his illness. I still have dreams about him sometimes. I believe that in some ways I was closer to him intellectually and in temperament than any of his family, at least in the latter years. In more than one of the dreams, he urged me to convert to Catholicism. It sounds irrational to say that those dreams influenced me, but they did. Besides my grandmother, I am probably the only family member who offers prayers for him, and then not as diligently as I should. Perhaps he knew that I would one day offer prayers for him.

So many answers are lost to me now. I wonder so much about his faith. I remember that he would receive brochures from Thomas Aquinas College. Had I graduated more conventionally instead of early, he might have had me apply there, though I was skeptical of not being able to major in English. He had volumes of classic texts that he would buy from what I believe was a small Catholic press. I have no idea, now, what the press was. I remember that the endpapers were designed with their repeating insignia, but as it had no significance to me then, I can't recall whether it was a symbol of Catholic significance. I believe it was.

If he went to Mass when I would have been old enough to remember, I can't say. I think he was among those disappointed by the changes following Vatican II. He was certainly disenchanted with the local Archbishop and the administration of the Archdiocese. He had no visible signs of his faith that I can pin down, unlike my grandmother, who had her rosary--and should still. I will hold in my heart always my image of her, sitting on her porch with her rosary, waiting in case my mom and I were able to visit her with my Doodle, but thinking that it was too late for us to come. I have wondered if he received Last Rites. I hope so. I believe my grandmother would have seen to it. I was disappointed for his sake that his funeral, sadly presided over by a painfully nontraditional priest. My aunt, Hispanic Catholic-turned-Protestant-Evangelical (off & on), liked the service. She felt that the funeral was for the survivors rather than the deceased. I think that a traditional Catholic funeral would have healed many of us more effectively. . . Certainly, it would have moved me closer to the Church sooner.

I have so many memories that I can't contain them all here. I remember as a very small child, I would always tell him "bonsoir" as I was leaving his house. It was the special word that I associated with him. I remember his stubbly cheek, and the smell of red wine on his breath in the evening. I remember running as a child of 5 or 6 to bring him a Budwieser from the old fridge on the "next door" side of the shotgun double when he came home from work. I remember his retirement party when I was in 5th grade--a year younger than my son is now. How he would sit on his porch swing on the back porch. How he hated the squirrels who ate the cypress balls and caused the sticky cypress mess to fall on the bricks of the backyard. I was recently reminded of this by some responses to this post about Darwin's lost tomato. My grandmother would tie homemade "sacks" around the figs in her fig tree to keep the birds from getting them before they were ripe; my grandfather would shoot the squirrels with a b-b gun to keep them out of the cypress tree.

I wrote this poem as an undergraduate in response to his death:

In the Garden of the House
on Dublin Street

Monet never painted one like this:
How the colors follow no pattern.

How within the chaos each leaf has
Its discernable place, and therefore

No one is very surprised to see
The cypress tree that is their brother;

Not surprised by the year, chipped in stone.
This garden swallows the dead. I know

When my grandfather died, he became
A porch swing, wooden, or an oak, life.

How life is dull, while death and still-life
Are colored alive, like the flowers.

How he never painted brown swallows
Dying on stone fences in gardens.

He had seven children, six of whom survive. He has 13 grandchildren, 10 of whom he knew, and 3 great-grandchildren who were not fortunate enough to meet him. He is strong in many of us. My siblings and I--all except one--inherit his eyes. My Doodle inherits more than that. She favors that side of my family, perhaps more than I do. I inherit his fear of death--especially, of a painful or lingering death, which is exactly what he had. I hope to be able to greet him one day. I pray that we will be reunited. When I was younger, growing up without a grounding in formal Catholicism, I was convinced that relatives who had died before I was born, specifically, my grandfather's parents and my mother's older brother, were looking down on my actions, taking an interest in or being proud of me. I wonder how I had a sense of the Communion of Saints--it was not something I learned from the Protestant churches I had attended. I never imagined that they had become "angels," as popular culture would have it, and I did "pray" to them in a way. I hope that he is looking down on me, on my children, and on all of my family. When I pray for the souls in Purgatory, I pray for his especially. If you could, please offer a prayer for him for his birthday, so close to the anniversary of his death.