Published Nov. 1, 2023

That sign has nothing to do with this post. It’s local, and the name is … well, you know. As I have said before, my photo budget is all tapped out. As am I many days.

Young adults in my orbit have lost grandfathers recently, and it’s reminded me that I’ve not had that life experience, never having felt that kind of loss in the traditional ways.

The loss I feel is a different kind. I never knew my grandfathers. Tragic circumstances surround both voids.

One of them died long before I was born. One of them died when I was young, after a complicated set of circumstances kept me from knowing him even a little bit. There is a home movie that shows me with him in a park where we visited when I was young, but I don’t remember any of it. It’s like watching a stranger try to make a connection with me, or the scared and confused me I was as a child. (Also: Ooh, a park. Maybe that’s why I chose the photo above for the featured image.)

As I said, it’s complicated.

As mentioned elsewhere, today marks 43 years since my dad died. That’s a long time.

I don’t know how old that photo is, but I think the second digit in 1980 was put back or replaced. Nothing lasts forever, whether it’s adhesive or dads.

Or granddads.

The people I know who are grieving had memories with their grandfathers. They had special names for both so people would know which one they were talking about when they came up in conversation. They know the sound of their voices.

That’s real. And real hard.

I was old enough to have a vague understanding of what was happening when my dad’s father died, but not enough to keep me from having terrifying nightmares sleeping in the living room of my grandmother’s house when we visited after his death and before he was buried. Removed from everyone else in another part of the house, I thought his ghost was going to roam the streets of that small town that night and come for me. There wasn’t enough context for me to process it all properly. He was not someone I knew, just a kind of scary-looking man who had put his discolored smoking fingertips on me in moments captured on film not long before.

Seeing his name on a grave marker was unsettling. That’s my dad’s name, I thought, but for the suffix, which barely registered. It was a cold January day, and a chilling preview of what I knew was coming someday, a day when I’d be looking at the same name on a grave marker, but with a different suffix.

I don’t remember there being much conversation about what death meant. I know that it was before this that I crawled into bed with my dad one night and asked him what dying was. That’s not an easy question to answer, of course, but I have long suspected that telling me what he did — that dying was like being asleep for a long time — is connected to my sleep issues and my lifelong nightmares. I don’t judge him for that, but it’s a real part of my life.

There’s a lot on my mind today. I think I will be glad when it’s tomorrow.