Angel on my Shoulder

I didn't know my Mom's father very well. Every memory I have of him I can count on one hand - and yet he left a powerful impression on me.

My earliest memory of him was a time he babysat his grandchildren, including my brother, my cousin Michael, his sister Shawna, and myself. Gremlins was playing on the TV and we were at my crazy Uncle Mike's house. The adults had all gone out together and we were told to stay inside... that's about all I remember, other than his bony fingers jabbing me as he patted me on my back. He clearly loved his grandchildren and we loved him in return.

Fast forward a few years... Dad had a year remote tour in Alaska and we couldn't go with him, so Mom moved us kids to Arkansas so she could be near her family. Looking back on that time now, I realize what a basket case she was then. I imagine I would be too if I had two children around me all the time and no spouse to help me take care of them at my age now. She was right about 30 years old then. I'm sure we drove her crazy.

We often spent afternoons and evenings at her parents house. By then my grandfather had already begun to forget many things. His mind was beginning to slip and occasionally he didn't know who he was anymore.

"Excuse me, Ma'am," he said one day while we were visiting my ill grandmother. Mom sat on the side of the bed taking care of her, feeding her soup. Grandpa had been sitting in the living room quietly watching TV for a while when suddenly he got a lost look in his face and stood up. He wandered into my grandmothers room. "I don't know where I am or how I got here," he paused and swallowed, "but if you let me stay the night, I promise I'll be gone by mornin'."

It was a very sad moment for my mother. I remember her crying over that day. He didn't know who he was or who the woman was he married and spent more than 35 years with. It was a devastating day for us all, and we knew then that his mind had really gone.

Over the years he had occasional moments of clarity, but they were so far and few between that I never really got the chance to know him. We only lived in Arkansas for that one year in my youth, and even though we went over there often, that's the only clear memory I have of him. That, I feel, is an absolute pitty.

The last memory I have of him while he was still alive was during my mothers 20 year High School reunion. My cousin Michael and I had stayed home with Grandpa because someone needed to be there with him. Otherwise he was prone to strip naked and wander down the street, wondering where he was. I wish it were something I could giggle about, but it got quite serious.

Michael and I were sitting on the couch. Grandpa was beside me and had been quiet for hours. It was fine with me, he didn't know who I was anyway. He hadn't known my name since I was around 5 years old. I was a complete stranger to him at 15 years. Suddenly, he spoke up.

"Who are those two little boys over there?" Since he often mumbled to himself, I took that moment to be that exact thing, his ramblings to himself. I didn't respond.

"Who are those two boys," he asked again after a long moment.

"Grandpa," I said, looking over towards the kitchen table where he pointed, "there aren't any little boys over there."

A few more minutes of silence followed before he spoke again. He mainly mumbled, but after a few minutes he grew loud enough to understand.

"Who are those two little boys over there," he asked me again, this time jabbing me in the ribs with his elbow.

"Grandpa, there's nobody over there," I said again, slightly annoyed.

"Yes there are," he said. "There's two little boys."

"Grandpa, there isn't anyone over there."

"Yes there are!" He was starting to get upset and I contemplated going along with it just to make him feel better. Just about the time I was going to say something, he continued. "Manda," he said, shocking me beyond belief, "there are two little boys over there, and they BOTH have wings!"

My jaw fell open and chills ran down my spine. I fell silent, put an arm around his tiny shoulders and held him tight for a long time. He patted me on the back.

"You're a good kid," he said. "I'm proud of you." The clarity in his eyes faded, and I knew once more that he was gone.

When Mom came back that night after her reunion, I had waited up to tell her what had happened. She fussed at first because I was still awake, but when I told her what happened, her eyes teared up and she stared at me in silence.

"It won't be long then," she said to me. She hugged me tightly and walked away. She couldn't look at me for a little while.

That year on my 16th birthday, he finally passed away of natural causes. Though I didn't know him, for some reason I feel like there was some kind of a connection between us. My 16th birthday should have been an amazing day. Some of my friends brought me cards and gifts that I loved, but I couldn't shake the melancholy feeling I was getting. It got stronger as the day went on. By the time my parents brought lunch to my school from Wendy's I knew deep inside that something was wrong. I couldn't explain it - I just knew.

When I got home, they came clean. They didn't want to ruin my birthday so they wouldn't tell me, but when I saw Mom watching old home movies looking for clips of Grandpa and talking on the phone to an airline rep, I knew what was going on. Dad told me and I cried, but suddenly the whole day made sense. I understood then. I didn't cry for too long - I settled. I've never before or since excepted a death that easily.

The story doesn't end there though... I never expected it to happen, but I saw him once more.

In the year 2000, on September 1st, my life took a dramatic halt - and I do mean halt. I died three times. Three times I was brought back by the doctors in an emergency surgery. Yet only once did my brain register any of this. It was one simple dream through all of it for me, as they fought for hours to save my life.

Far off in the distance, I saw him walking towards me. He looked exactly how he did when I was so little, when he was elderly but healthy. He walked with purpose and a slight swagger. He smiled that broad smile he had, and the right eye squinted a bit. There was no mistaking it, that was my grandfather under that brown fedora.

"Well Kiddo," he said to me when he got close, "ya ready to go?" I was puzzled.

"Go where, Grandpa?"

He looked me up and down a long moment. He smirked, smiled, and patted me on the back with his bony hand once more. I felt the knotted knuckles thump my flesh on my shoulder. It was painfully wonderful.

"Naw," he said in that familiar southern accent he had, "you aren't ready." He smiled at me once more and nodded his head towards whatever lay behind me. "Go home, Kid."

I woke up in the hospital at that moment and looked up into the red and crying eyes of my Mother and Father.

"Hi, Mom," I said. "Hi Dad." That was about all I remember. I passed out then and woke up two days later with both of them close to the bed. They never left my side.

I never had the heart to tell my Mom about that dream. I've never forgotten about it, and I know I'll remember it for as long as humanly possible, but I'll always believe that he chose me for a reason. He loved me for who I was.

And he sent me back for a reason.

Death of a Chieftan

On April 1st of 2004 I recieved a phone call from my Mother. Since we rarely talked, I assumed that she had revived her ambition to pull a great practical joke, as she did about every 5 years or so. I didn't pay much attention to the tone in her voice, thinking she was going to do something to pull my proverbial chain.

"Amanda" she said, sounding rather morose, "Your Grandfather just died." Thinking back to when my Grandmother died just 6 weeks before, I didn't think this was a very funny April Fools Joke, but I laughed anyway.

In the year 2007 my grandfather had been given 2 weeks to live. He had been diagnosed with conjestive heart failure, emphazema, lung cancer, skin cancer, and numerous other ailments. At my Grandmothers funeral in February of 2004, I learned something about those two weeks I may not have ever known.

"Bob," my Grandfather said, speaking to my father, "don't expect me to stick around." I could tell even from the other room that my father didn't know how to respond. He had been standing beside my Grandfathers wheelchair in the living room at the time. I turned and watched from the dining room, worried. My father knelt down beside his father and took his hand.

"I know, Dad. I know."

Had my Grandfather been a little younger or my Dad been a little older, they could havve passed for brothers. My Dad just looked like a younger version of Grandpa. Even the sadness in their eyes mirrored one another at that moment. I'd never seen my father cry in my life, but as I stood there watching from a distance, I watched him wipe his face. My Grandfather put his free hand on my Dad's head and I saw his shoulders heave in a heavy, silent sob. My heart broke watching that powerful man I knew as "Dad" begin to cry.

"Bobby," my Grandfather began, "all those years ago when the doctors said I wouldn't survive, the only reason I did was because of her." He took a breath here. He was easily winded and relied on an oxygen machine, as he had done since 1997. "While I was sitting there in the damned hospital, she came in to visit me." Another breath. "I thought I was going to die at any second." He coughed, out of breath.

"Dad," my father said, "take it easy. We can talk later."

"I know - but I need to tell you." He managed to curl the corners of his mouth up a little. It was the most of a smile I had seen on him in a long time. "I was happy to see her. I always loved Irene, Bobby."

"I know you did, Dad."

"Well, she yelled at me that day and it broke my heart," he said. My father looked appauled. Before he could ask why she would have done something like that to him, my Grandfather continued. "She told me right then and there, 'Sherm, don't you die on me. I can't live without you, so don't you die.' I figured I had something worth living for."

My father choked back a sob. I knew why. That was exactly how he and my mother felt about one another.

"Well, Bobby," my Grandfather continued, "my reason is gone now." He must have seen the look in my fathers' face, or noticed that he had started crying harder, because he continued after a minute. "Son, it doesn't mean I don't love you any less. It's just," he paused, "Well," he took a breath, "you don't need me. Not like she did." He smiled, patted my Dad's arm, and said finally, "I don't want to live without her."

I sat at the table for many hours that night, hoping and praying to someday find a love like that. As they prepared his suit for the funeral on the following day, they pulled out several items from the pockets; old tissues, an embroidered handkerchief, a brass colored pill box. The last of these items somehow found it's way into my hands as I sat there.

I ran my fingers over and over the wooden four-leaf clover hand carved on its surface. I thought about that conversation between my father and my grandfather for hours. Without paying any attention, I absent mindedly felt one of my tears trickle down my cheek and drop from my chin, landing squarely in the center of that four leaf clover. I wiped it off and set the tiny box back on the table. I sat looking at it for a long time that night, remembering childhood Christmases with my Grandmother and Grandfather. I remembered random visits, though there weren't as many as I would have liked. Somehow I remembered this box from my childhood. He once held it in his hand when I was just a kid. It was a distant memory, and try as I might I couldn't recal the details, but I knew he had held it in his hand. I reached to take his hand as we walked and my hand had touched the wooden and metal surfaces of the object. I remember thinking it was pretty, and then he tucked it away in his pocket. Until that night, I never saw it again.

"Manda?" My mother asked from the other end of the phone. "Are you still there?" Tears had begun streaming down my face. I realized that it wasn't a joke. I sat down hard.

"Yeah, Mom, I'm still here."

"Manda, I'm at the house now and people are going to start dividing things up tomorrow to begin cleaning stuff up. Was there anything of your Grandfathers that you wanted?" Disgusted, I couldn't answer. How could they start dividing his things up so soon, wanting to each have their own piece? No, there wasn't anything of his I wanted but the memories he had given to me as a child. I paused. I thought.

"Mom?"

"Yeah, Honey?"

"There was a pill box with a four-leaf clover. If you can find it, that's all I want."

My mother found that pill box, and through a stroke of luck it ended up in my hotel room the night my uhaul was stolen in July of 2009 and I still have it. It's kept with my most precious posessions and the only thing to be found inside is a diamond necklace pendant - the only diamonds I own. Somehow it reminds me of him - a diamond on the inside.





April 1st, 2004


April fools day, only this isn't quite a day for jokes.

I've made several attempts to write everything I remember in my live that have stuck with me, be it exciting, interesting or funny. This attempt, though still to early to tell if it's a success, was prompted by a family tragedy.

Six weeks ago, my grandmother passed away and I flew from Los Angeles to New York for the funeral immediately. As much of a tragedy as that was, the true tragedy was in the passing of my grandfather this morning. Both of them were fascinating people with many wonderful stories of their pasts who never got a chance to tell them to the world, or more importantly, to their two great grandchildren. It struck me that these two would never hear the stories of Grandpa's trips around the world during the Korean War, stories of the cabinet making he did all over the state of New York, or the embarrassing stories of my fathers childhood.

I don't want the stories I have to tell to die with me. I have too much to say not to write this journal. My only son deserves to at least know that I tried. I have a lot to tell him. Honestly, I have a lot to tell anyone who will listen to what I have to say.

I've made a lot of mistakes, told a lot of lies, and done some very stupid things. In writing this, I hope that perhaps my son can learn from my own mistakes. This isn't a told-you-so storybook. There's nothing fictional I will ever write into it's pages. It's not something I'm writing to try and clear my own conscience. This is the truth; the untold stories I once swore to myself that no one else would ever know. I wasn't always a good person, and I'm far from being proud of it, but I'm not so proud as to hide my past from those I love any longer.

I suppose my grandfather was a huge inspiration to me, as well as my son. Still, along with the two of them, my inspiration has come from my mother and father, my grandmother, and everyone in my life I've ever loved and adored.

Or hated.


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