To this day, I’m extremely jealous of those my age that still have their grandparents. It’s why I love my elders and see in them what might have been for me and what should have been for my grandparents. As with my grandmother before him, I can’t recall the day Papa went into the hospital or why he was admitted. I was a freshman in high school, and old enough to be admitted for visiting hours.
Pa suffered for weeks from a brain hemorrhage, coming in and out of normalcy and not being able to speak or feed himself. One day he couldn’t hold a spoon or talk and the next, he’d be as sharp as ever. Finally, one afternoon he said to me, “I want to go in a nice way.” And then he gave me a list of things that I said I would take care of for him. An hour later, the call came and my brother Ralph and I went to the hospital to collect his things. He was still in bed and I thought he’d never looked better. There was color in his cheeks and he could have been sleeping. Pa went, as he wanted, in a nice way.
We were eating pizza for dinner that night when the phone call came and somehow, when the person on the other end asked for my father, I knew what had happened. My brother bolted out of the room, I think, running to my cousin’s house across the way. I sat at the kitchen table. Did I cry? I can’t recall, but my world had shifted again. Maybe because there were other wakes since that first time I set foot in a funeral home, but I did not need my mother’s hand. I turned to my cousin, Janet, and I said, “It feels as if his spirit isn’t even here, does it?” She looked at me, patted my arm and said, “He could not wait to be with grandma.”
To this day, I believe what Janet said to me with all my heart. Leaving us was easy because of what waited for him on the other side.
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