For Grandpa

It feels impossible to write about grief without tripping over cliches.

When I write, I tumble toward sweeping conclusions. I begin with minor moments and reach for meaning as my words wind down. I grasp at whatever bits of wisdom I might have gathered throughout my experiences and try to mold bite-sized pieces that fit perfectly into the constraints of each paragraph.

But there’s no conclusion here. There is only the ugly truth that my grandpa was watching a football game on the couch one moment and unconscious the next. There is only the knowledge he spent a few days in the hospital while I sat helplessly across the country, waiting for the call that his heart had stopped beating.

My grief is in the details. Most of these details are meaningless to people who never met my grandfather, but my healing is in my sharing. My speaking. My remembering. My lamenting and my longing.

I walked my grandmother into the funeral home on the morning of Grandpa’s visitation. We were the first to arrive and the place felt so hollow, but I was grateful for a moment of peace before the release of grief I’d been swallowing down for hours. I held her hand and asked if she was ready for the events of the day. It was a ridiculous question in hindsight, but I didn’t know how to keep quiet. I wanted to pretend that somehow the day’s misery could be muted with small talk.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she replied.

I didn’t make it to the hospital, so the shock of his lifelessness was overwhelming when I approached the open casket. I ran into my mother’s arms and buried my face in her shirt like I did throughout my childhood. Grandpa was buried in a warm flannel top - the kind he was so frequently photographed in during his younger years, when he’d venture out on hunting trips with his beloved brother. There was a discord between the colorful comfort of his outfit and the somber reality of the occasion.

The last time I saw Grandpa alive, he asked when he’d be receiving an invitation to my hypothetical future wedding and called me out for pocketing a few of his coveted jelly beans. I told him all about my new digs in California. He told me about the time he and my grandma drove to California on their westward move in the early 1950s. Their car broke down and they found themselves stranded near a peach orchard. With no money to buy food after paying for car repairs, he and Grandma “borrowed” a few peaches from the orchard and ate themselves sick. I cling to that image of them: young and sunburnt and westward bound, full on sweet fruit and ready for adventure.

When I said goodbye that day, he hugged and kissed me the way he always did: strong and genuine, with just a scratch of stubble. I told him I loved him. I walked out the door and into my mother’s minivan. I never watched him take another breath.

When I was a child, Grandpa intermittently let me smear makeup on his face and comb his thick hair into all sorts of silly shapes. He’d sit and read the paper while I arranged his locks with butterfly clips and touched him up with streaks of pink lipstick. He raised 13 children of his own, after all - what was a little chaos from his granddaughter?

There was makeup on the man in the casket, but he looked like a plastic mold of my grandfather. The creases between his fingernails and fingertips were smudged with concealer. The carelessness of the makeup job made me inexplicably angry. Grandpa’s hands were one of his distinguishing features: bulky and sturdy and worn by time, but somehow gentle. Now here they were, slathered with stage makeup just to appear alive. But he wasn’t alive and he wasn’t reading the newspaper and I couldn’t cover his hair with butterfly clips. I cried for that.

I spent the morning of the visitation ironing Grandpa’s white handkerchiefs. He had dozens of them, collected throughout his 86 years of life and always kept around to muffle one of his earth-shattering sneezes. How strange it was to sit in his suddenly too-quiet house, ironing his favorite accessories without him standing by to gently poke fun at me. Somehow, though, It felt like my last private moment with him. We set the hankies out at the funeral home and relatives took them home as keepsakes.

The next morning was Grandpa’s funeral mass. I read a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes and was grateful for the way that my pre-public speaking nerves distracted me from the tears I was holding inside.

A few of his grandsons carried the casket back into the hearse as we filed out of the church. For as long as I’ll live, I’ll never forget the gutting finality of watching that hearse drive away. The quiet sobs of my aunts and uncles, the way I held my mother as she said goodbye to “Daddy,” the shivers that were half from the freezing December weather and half from the naked sadness of the scene. That we were expected to walk next door for a luncheon and some socializing - with what appetite? With what strength?

I saw my grandfather once every few months when he was alive and rarely spoke to him on the phone. I was an imperfect granddaughter and an infrequent communicator. But I was took solace in the knowledge that he was there and he was solid and he was healthy for his age. He was supposed to stick around. I was supposed to regale him with my exciting tales of Los Angeles life. I was supposed to see him again - even just one more time. This is the infuriating way in which grief grounds us just as it’s too late.

I feel more afraid than I have in a long time. I am still so embroiled in the grieving process that I can’t yet share any grand takeaways or useless platitudes about the value of calling our loved ones to tell them we care. We can tell them we love them and they will still leave us someday. I’m afraid of losing everyone and everything, just as I’ve been since I was a child, but this fear is more urgent. Lately, I sit awake at night and feel suffocated by the impermanence of it all, completely immune to my standard anxiety coping techniques. I have the proof of my fears’ validity right in front of me: why should I be soothed?

There are bits of him everywhere. Pennies on the ground and men who look like him in coffee shops. I found myself in the midst of a grief-induced anxiety attack while grabbing a few groceries and began walking aimlessly through the aisles to settle my mind, finally catching my breath in the snack section. I looked up and saw that I had somehow landed directly in front of a display of Werther’s hard candy - Grandpa’s signature pocket candy.

I don’t believe in signs, but I do believe in reminders. And I am grateful for every reminder that he was here. That we had him. That he gave me the most wonderful mother in the world, whose burdens I want to carry every day. Whose pain I try to imagine and whose strength and resolve I aspire to match.

I always want to remember his voice, his subtle yet warm smile, the way he teared up at particularly touching commercials. The frequency with which he cleared his throat and the smell of his coffee in the morning. The house on Ridge Road where I would find him on the back porch chatting with whichever family member had stopped by. The radio and the reunions and the rare moments alone with him, far from the chaos of our holiday gatherings.

During Grandpa’s last days, his children and grandchildren spent shifts at his bedside. Our family is so large that we essentially established our own Ruhlman wing in the small hospital where he passed away. I wasn’t there, but I know there was laughter among the tears. I know that my family put together a puzzle as they sat next to Grandpa - and when the puzzle was completed, a single piece was mysteriously missing. I know that all thirteen of his children had the chance to squeeze his hand before he left us. I know that he was surrounded by love until the machines flatlined. I know that it was peaceful.

There’s comfort in that.

I don’t have a conclusion. Grief has no conclusion.

But I had my grandpa and I loved him very much.

Everett Robert Ruhlman
1932-2018