I don’t want to oversimplify my grandma’s death, but truly it was easy in a way. She had been experiencing mental decline for a while and was starting to experience physical decline, so her passing was not a large shock. She died at the beginning of my winter break junior year of college, so I had plenty of time and space to process. More than anything however, I think the fact that I knew her so well left me with little regret. Of course I think I could have been better as a teen and a college student, and I felt that guilt for a little while after her death, but ultimately she was a big part of my life when I was younger. Despite not being as close to my granddad, it’s his death that has been much harder.
From everything I know about him, he was a good man. He worked and volunteered visiting the sick, a chaplain at the local hospital and through his church. He always made great efforts to get to know people and remember things about them wherever he went. Even after his death, when my mom visited his bank within the grocery store, the employees treated my mom like she was related to a celebrity. How much is genetics verses his own efforts I don’t know, but his memory for all these details about people was quite incredible. I know it can’t be purely genetics because I’m certainly not very good at remembering names nor engaging in small talk myself.
I could go on and on about all these things that I know about him, but that’s the catch, they are just merely factoids. Despite the fact that I was at my grandparents house a decent amount as a kid, and that I had a difficult relationship with my dad and a lack of any other male figures in my life, I didn’t really have a relationship with my granddad. My granddad was not apathetic to me by any means. He was probably my biggest fan and loved to learn about all the things my grandma and mom had to pass along to him. He had many pictures of me scattered about and kept my college schedules posted on the wall to know where I was during the day. His SJU Grandpa hat was his favorite to wear, even though my mom had to wash it often due to skin cancer on his head at one point in time.
Nonetheless, my relationship with him was almost always mediated by others present, I rarely spent time alone with him. My grandma monopolized my time when I was little and I often spent time just with her, without someone else present. My relationship with her was personal, one-on-one. In fact, it wasn’t until college after my grandma had passed, with my mom out of the room for a minute, that it dawned on me that this was a very odd and rare moment just talking to him alone. It soon ended as my mom wasn’t gone for long, but I wish I had the wisdom to realize how important and bizarre it was that this moment felt novel to me.
Then he died fall semester senior year. No break to process his death and it was much more unexpected with his mental sharpness still in tact, with a better memory than men much younger than he. Now both of my maternal, English-speaking grandparents were gone, and it felt weightier somehow. A more sudden shift, not grandparent-less, but with my only surviving grandparent unable to speak English and losing my Spanish speaking ability after my dad stopped speaking it to me when I was five, the weight of this shift was distressing beyond the loss of an individual. The main point of my grief, however, has been this lack of really knowing him, though my understanding of these thoughts and feelings have shifted over time.
At first it was just a general sense of regret of not having spent more time and not having known him better. Eventually this evolved to acknowledging that I didn’t have more time just him and myself. A lot of these thoughts were based in my own actions or inaction, accompanied by a sense of guilt. Feeling bad that being wrapped up in my life as a teen and a college student left me rather disinterested in spending time with my grandparents.
This then turned into frustration that my mom hadn’t realized how important it would be for me to have spent time alone with my granddad when I was little. That she didn’t make sure that this happened for me. In addition, my grandma often alienated me from him by making jokes at his expense and said how weird he was. Though intended as a joke, this didn’t help in conjunction with her monopolizing behavior. The pattern continued, and it left me not knowing him well, my mom or grandma typically present or not far off.
As I got older and saw both of my grandparents less frequently, the mediation of my mom trying to pull things out of me made me even less likely to want to see them, even if that wasn’t their fault. Maybe I should have been smart enough to realize that I didn’t dislike seeing my grandparents, so much as that I disliked my mom trying to make me talk to them with her present, but I wasn’t wise enough or took enough time to parse out those details. I got my drivers license later than most of my peers and it never occurred to me to just see my grandparents without my mom present. Instead I saw them infrequently and typically on holidays, which were particularly stressful due to longstanding family drama tainting the mood, making my desire to see them fade even more as I got older.
There’s been something else there though that I think I’ve struggled to accept, resentment, so buried even now I struggle to feel it fully, a resentment against my granddad. I feel like I shouldn’t feel this way. He’s won awards for his volunteer service, he tried to learn the names of people others didn’t, when he was hospitalized nurses and aides took their lunch breaks with him because he was so encouraging and personable. I’m nonetheless bitter though, because that’s not my experience. He knew what he knew about me through other people, not as much as his conversations and efforts with me. That he didn’t think of how desperately I could use a healthier paternal influence that it’d be worth carving out more one-on-one time with me. That he didn’t stand up to his stubborn wife, if need be, to make it happen. That he didn’t realize that just having him as a fan would be so empty in the wake of his death. Bitter, that a bunch of adults in charge of my welfare didn’t have the good judgement to foresee that. Instead, I’m the one left to walk with the weight of not having really known him and him not really having known me.