My Grandfather's World Was Round

The hardest part of my grandfather's death was that my grandmother kept forgetting he was gone. It wasn't that either of us had to relive some painful re-realization of his death every time she mentioned how well he was doing in the hospital in a show of false optimism and I had to tell her There is no need for that anymore he is so many ashes in a box now, but rather it trivialized his death. His death became a piece of rote information to be memorized, a name to be crossed out of our phone books, a slight alteration to reality easily remedied with the stroke of a pen. It was helped by the fact that I did not have a very grandfatherly relationship with him beyond the typical coddling shown by grandparents to their young grandchildren, and as I grew older that relationship failed to mature in kind and so was left behind. It might be more accurate—clinical, but accurate—to say I was more the offspring of his daughter than I was his grandson.

It was easy, then, to think about his death more analytically, less as the end of his specific existence and more generally, as the end of a family era, the end of a narrative, not just for my family but for all American families. He was an exemplar of the long string of traumas our country went through and his generation experienced in the early to middle 20^th century. Raised during the Great Depression, he watched Pearl Harbor from a Hawaiian hillside, served in the bloody Pacific theatre, and raised four boys and two girls during the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement and 70's counterculture. These experiences imparted a subtle but deeply-rooted cultural pathology upon my grandfather's generation; the older he got, the more polarized and entrenched he became, until he was a man who was frugal and stubborn beyond all common sense. He insisted on running the same washwright until he was 86 and saved every cent (sometimes by not paying his taxes), even while his business was running a net loss of a thousand dollars a month, while he was living in a home worth a million dollars with three hundred thousand dollars in paper Exxon-Mobil stock (from before it was Exxon-Mobil) stashed under the mattress, safe from only the dimmest of thieves. All this while Parkinson's was slowly claiming his facilities—and of course he snubbed medicine. What trumped my grandfather's dedication to common sense and practicality—virtues that cemented my his generation in our cultural consciousness as one of the greatest—was his desire for independence and self-sufficiency.

While he was in the hospital, cards and letters flooded in from customers charmed by his tenacity, expressing a deep compassion approaching familial love—as if he was their grandfather, too. My mother's reaction stays with me: that This is his family. His customers—not his biological family at home. I saw then how easy it was for him to not be particularly grandfatherly toward me, when he had not been particularly fatherly toward his children, beyond simply providing for them.

He had wanted to be an island unto himself. But his generation's concepts of independence are outdated; we are all too interconnected now. The pioneer culture has gone global; it looks now to bring people ever closer together and hurdle the old obstacles of space and time. The persona my grandfather wanted to put forward—of a self-made, self-sufficient man, unfettered even by a commitment to family—proved to be an illusion skillfully woven over the years but also frayed by age and frank obsolescence. Men like that have not existed for a long time, and they will never exist again in the incarnations we are familiar with. My grandfather's drive for independence ultimately failed in this society because Independence, as a concept, is inextricably tied to economic reality—and he owed people money. He owed the government; he owed a business partner. We are conned from an early age or forced by birth or necessity to owe people money just in order to exercise basic human agency, and we are made to believe these debts are all-encompassing. And so they become so. I think my grandfather saw this. I believe he felt alienated by the system, as I do. But his response was to ignore it. I have seen what happens when it remains ignored; there is a mess to clean up. If you are lucky, like he was, you won't have to clean up your own mess—but those that come after you will.

What died with my grandfather was a set of beliefs, experiences, and a brief quiet struggle with his lot in life, which nobody ever consulted him on. He shared much in common with his generation's men, in mindset and qualities. The general consensus—right or wrong, it doesn't matter—is that men like him advanced this country while they were young and hinder it now that they are old, as is the rise and fall of generations dictated by history. As is also with so many things in history, the math boils down to a net neutral, a zero. He is neither to be commended or condemned merely for existing for a while and then stopping—ostensibly to go do something better with his time—as it is the least any of us can do. It is all we can do.