Requiem

July 19. A mixed day in family history, a day of beginnings and of endings. It was forty-four years ago today that my maternal grandfather died; my paternal grandmother would’ve turned eighty-five today. It’s odd that two of my grandparents would share a date of significance, as I really don’t know either of them.

Both of my grandfathers would die before I was born. On my mom’s side I have plenty of pictures but don’t really know the man; on my dad’s side I have but a few pictures, mostly from yellowed, seventy year old newspaper clippings (another topic for another time), but I know a fair amount about the man. On July 18, 1962 my grandfather came home from work a little early complaining of discomfort in his chest. He wrote it off as gas pains, and decided that if he felt bad the next day he’d come home early where he and my grandmother would go off to the store to buy some spinach, which is apparently good for alleviating gas pain (or it was forty-four years ago). The next day he went off to work but was still feeling bad, so he came home not long after noon. My grandmother arrived home to take him to the store and found him dead in bed, a victim of a heart attack. I would never get to meet him, but in subsequent years I would accompany my grandmother along with my siblings to tend to his grave.

For whatever reason I didn’t have the same relationship with my dad’s mother as I did with my mom’s, or at least I don’t recall having the same type of relationship. We never spent much time at my grandmother’s place, but the limited memories I have of spending time there are fond ones. I remember my brother and me staying the night at her house one time and being fascinated that at dinnertime I got to drink from the same Superman glass that my dad did when he was young.

I think root cause of the distance was that my grandmother’s second husband was a complete bastard. My paternal grandfather died when his train was struck from behind by a second passenger train. I’m not sure that my dad ever really got over the loss of his father and my grandmother’s remarriage; if he did, then he certainly did an excellent job of internalizing it. The last I heard the “other guy” was still alive, and if there were any justice in this world he’d have been hit by a cross-town bus by now. That may sound mean spirited, but consider that when my grandmother passed away in 1978, this guy removed all the jewelry off of my grandmother before they closed her casket and you get an idea of the caliber of his person. She’s in a better place now and hopefully much happier than she ever seemed to be from my personal observations. It makes me wonder how so many lives would’ve been different had my grandfather not been killed at the age of thirty-three on a Thanksgiving Eve.

So on this day I will think of my grandfather and wish my grandmother a Happy Birthday.