It’s been a couple of weeks now since he passed.
I feel suspended.
For a while, I withheld the news from people who didn’t really need to know; co-workers, friends. Not because it would make it seem like it didn’t happen- because it was already an all-encompassing reality. It was management. Like a sociopath who lies compulsively, not to achieve an outcome but to control his environment.
Part of me feels like I’m supposed to wait for a while before returning back to life as normal. And the sadness is pervasive: more than I expected, and more than I feel entitled to. I didn’t… love him enough, and I didn’t respect him enough, and isn’t mourning a privilege reserved for the genuine? It’s hard thinking about him, placing the transparency of my value system over the outworkings of his life. I think a lot about what I don’t know about him, and hope that that part of him contains more love and gentleness and peace than the parts I knew. The way my dad and uncle grieved him- he must have been more to them, once, then.
The sum of a life is more than its end, just like the impact of a book is built by more than the last sentence.
It’s better not knowing, really. I wish the constraints of what I believe about the afterlife were looser. I’m not at all certain that he’s in heaven now, or if he ever believed in God and truth, or if there could be a special dispensation of grace for him. I don’t know what he loved deepest and most, and I don’t know that it was Christ. I do know he would tell me it was his own damn business.
It’s not right, the imperfect, inarticulate way I’m writing about it, and I wonder if words can profane memory. An epitaph online, something I wanted to say at the funeral we never gave for him. The sadness won’t vanish; it’s like darkness, that corners in relentless shadows even when a light clicks on. A new way of looking at the world, a world less one, is in order. A world in which I realize that a person is not defined by what I know about him.
He was solipsistic man. He was a husband and a father, and maybe a better one than I understand, because at the end of the day his wife and sons loved and served him with a loyalty that is as heartbreaking as it is rare. He was selfish, but worried for others; he had his vices, but did not perhaps love them as some do. He ventured to learn. And for all his faults and my faults and the distance placed between us by disrespect, I never for a moment felt judged by him; nor did I feel that he ever wanted anything less than his idea of the best for me. He thought I deserved it, that it was mine for the taking.
Stubbornness and assertiveness are his legacy to me as solidly as the silver airplane bookends and the rosary beads. Knowing what you want and how to ask for it is no small gift, especially for a woman.
I am puzzled by my total disinclination to pray about Grandpa Art and his passing; it's like I feel like there's no comfort there for me, only more confusion and pain. Instead I want to lean on my friends, talk talk talk about it, but when they're there I know I can't say everything, we'll run out of time and space and love for it. So there's just God. But-- I don't think that He knew my grandpa, or possibly that he cared about him. Because nothing characterized Grandpa's attitude so much as one abandoned, fending for himself. A life without refuge.
There’s the connection, though, between God and I, because we both loved him despite himself and despite the inclination and abrasion of circumstance. With personhood there is always something to love. And damn it if we didn't love the man.
rkb
