My Grandfather Makes Me Cry

My Grandfather Makes Me Cry

1.       He’s 94 years old.

2.       He married my grandmother when he was 26.  She was six years his senior, and had five children by her first husband.

3.       He became my and my brother’s legal guardian, with my grandmother, during a tumultuous and frightening time in our childhood.

4.       He opened savings accounts for us and made us invest 10% of our weekly allowance report card earnings, and he matched that 10%, to teach us the power of compound interest.

5.       He keeps my grandmother’s ashes by his bed and talks to her twice a day.

6.       He has survived 4 of his 5 children, and he supported my grandmother emotionally and financially for 64 years, through family illnesses, death, and strife.

7.       About a year ago, he fell and fractured his hip and back.  I expressed my anger about the fact that the nurses couldn’t keep his medication straight, and I was ready to give them a piece of my mind.  But he stopped me and said, “They’re fine.  I don’t want to make waves.  This is nothing, and I might really need them someday.”

8.       About four years ago, he made a new lady friend, who recently passed away.  He loved her easily and completely.  When someone mentions her, he says, “She was quite a lady,” and he knows this takes nothing away from the love he had for my grandmother, who he admits “was the best partner in life [he] could have asked for.”

9.       In response to any hardship, he simply says, “You play the hand you’re dealt; that’s all.”

10.   He suffers from macular degeneration and is nearly completely blind, registering only shapes and shadows. 

11.   He never gets bored.  He has about 500 songs on an MP3 player.  He just kicks back with his headphones plugged into his ears, his hearing aid turned up, enjoying the sounds of everything country including Willie Nelson, George Strait, and Taylor Swift.  Also, he has a machine from the Braille Institute that plays books on tape.  He can adjust the speed and tone of voice of the reader to suit his preference and mood.  When his sight was better, he worked as a volunteer repairing these machines.

12.   When I arrived to visit once, he looked at me and furrowed his brow.
               "What's that on your head?" he asked.  "You wearing a hat?"

 I replied first with a small, quiet laugh.  “It’s my hair.  Up in a bun!” 

 He dismissed this information with a shake of his head.

 I wondered if his dismay stemmed from his misperception or from the fact that I thought wearing my hair up on my head like a hat was a good idea.

13.   The most recent time I visited my grandfather, he shared his concern over having lost a significant amount of weight.  He didn’t look smaller than before, but I asked how much he’d lost. 

“I’m down to 143,” he said with a frown.  “I’m not going to be around much longer if I keep losing weight like this.  Last weigh in was 162.  And I just don’t have an appetite.  I’m forcing myself to eat, though.”

“Well, that’s not good.  I wonder why you’re losing so much so fast.”

“I don’t know.  Hope the doctor can give me some answers.  Otherwise, I’m a goner.”

We proceeded to eat our dinner.  He cleaned his plate: Chicken Parmesan, red potatoes, and peas and carrots.  He’d also eaten a cup of yellow split pea soup as an appetizer, and a glass of Salmon Creek chardonnay.  For dessert, he ordered a scoop of vanilla ice cream.  

"I'm trying to eat," he said. 

When we returned to his apartment, I asked him if he wanted me to check his scale. 

“Sure, why don’t you,” he said.  “What I have to do to check my weight is stand on it and then bend over and move one of the little colored plastic markers over to where the needle goes.  And then, I pick up the scale and take it over to my reader [a special magnifying machine for the blind] so I can see where the marker is.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very accurate way to weigh yourself,” I laughed.

“Well, it’s pretty good.  It’s the best I got.”

I went into his bathroom and weighed myself.  I was secretly hoping it might show that I, too, had dropped twenty pounds since my last weigh in.  The scale was set about a pound on the light side, but my weight was accurate. 

“It seems to be right,” I called to him.  “You wanna get on this thing and have me read it for you?”

“We might as well,” he said.  He pushed his walker into the bathroom and abandoned it to step onto the scale.

“Grandpa,” I said.  “It says you weigh 162.”  I checked the needle again.

“Well how ‘bout that,” he said.

“Good to know you aren’t wasting away after all.”

“Sure is.”

I moved the blue marker that had been previously set to 143.  “Now you know where you are,” I said.

Later that evening, I had a phone conversation with my brother about the faulty weigh-in situation, and we discussed the benefits of a talking scale.

“I can see it now,” I said, “Get off me, fatty!  Ow, you’re hurting me!  Lay off the sweets, will ya, Sweets?”

My brother laughed.  “It’ll read him the weight so he doesn’t have to go through so much trouble.”

“Yeah, we certainly can’t trust a blind man to read the scale right.”

My grandfather’s birthday is in October, and while he certainly would get a kick out of a scale that told him he needed to cut back on the biscuits, he can really use one that tells him he’s not wasting away.

14.    When I tell my grandfather we sure got lucky to have him in our family, he pats me on the hand and says, “I sure am the lucky one, and I love you so, so much.”

And that’s how he makes me cry.