The Hiccup Moment

During the September of my senior year in college, I went on a very disastrous date. The guy turned out to be a dog-hating conservative. I am, under exigent circumstances, willing to negotiate on the political front. Barring the excuse of a previous traumatic experience, though, I really just can’t get behind not liking dogs. To put it bluntly: that just ain’t right.

From the upstairs Thai restaurant, we gratefully went our separate ways after the date, just as it started to rain. I was in no way prepared for the weather and took shelter on the old-fashioned porch of the local inn, already soaking wet. It was then that I noticed I had a voicemail from my dad.

My dad seldom calls me just to check in. I have always initiated check-ins, so unfortunately, when I get a voicemail from him, it’s not often good tidings. I listened to his voicemail under the awning of the porch: more bad news about my grandmother’s health. Her decline was becoming more rapid.

In that moment, already starting to shiver from the rain, I had a very sad and very simple epiphany: there was no more good news coming. There was none left to be had.

In retrospect, that moment was one of the turning points for me in what turned out to be the last month of my beloved grandmother’s life. I think that was the moment when I truly realized she wasn’t going to get better; that the quiet, quirky, intensely intelligent, and immensely loving woman whom I had adored for my entire life was, in some ways, already gone.

When, about a month after that, she did leave us, as sweetly and gently as she lived her life, I still felt like I would break in half from the grief. Nevertheless, that moment on the porch held a very important flash of clarity. It wasn’t welcome, but it was necessary.

I think, for better or worse, I had another one of those moments recently.

Two years ago this October, I got another one of those calls from my dad. His father, who with my grandmother is the heart of our whole family, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis—a word that clanked dully in my head—was six months to a year, at the very best.

The bad thing about living alone is that no one is immediately there to pick you up off the floor when that’s where you suddenly find yourself, wailing. The good news about living alone is that you can sit there on the floor and wail just as much as you want: true, tearing, broken howls.

The fundamental difference in my thinking about the respective health of my mother’s mother and my father’s father goes back to my childhood. Grandma had had several heart attacks when I was still in my single digits. Grandpa had still beaten me down a ski slope into my late teens. Where I always remember her as having been frail, he was always robust. In a way, Grandma’s death had never been out of the realm of possibility. Grandpa’s mortality was, and in many ways still is, a completely foreign concept to me. It does not compute. It doesn’t work. As my sister told me once, we all figured he’d die in a freak ski accident at the age of a hundred and four.

So why, suddenly, were words like “prognosis” and “metastasized” being used in relation to him? Why was that okay? How did that possibly make sense?

I hate it when I can answer my own questions: that the reality of age and illness very rarely is okay, or makes sense, but that doesn’t stop it from happening anyway.

Over the succeeding months, which became a year, which became more than a year, something rather miraculous happened. The cancer responded well to treatment. While still difficult, his reaction to the chemo was not as debilitating as it could have been. He lost his hair and got horn-rimmed glasses, so that when people asked what was different about him, he could say, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, “Oh! I got new glasses. That must be it.”

Grandpa, feisty and good-natured as ever he was, stayed himself.

And I, stubborn and afraid as ever I was, stayed very firmly in denial.

The realities have been seeping in more slowly than they would have, had the cancer been more aggressive or if he had not responded well to treatment. In that time, I have had to come to realize that while he is still himself, he is also dying. That idea still gives me pause, is still illogical in the greater context of the man I know and love. But it is also true.

Last week, I had one of the worst cases of hiccups I have ever had. It was one of those times where your chest is so tight that when you hiccup, you feel as though your whole diaphragm is about to spasm out through your mouth. The noise you make is not a demure little “hic” but more like a strangled “HURK.”

I could barely breathe, let alone speak, so I did the one thing I know to do: I called Grandpa.

One of his many legacies in our family is his incredible ability to cure the hiccups. You will tell him, gasping and squeaking, that you have the hiccups. He will level his eye on you in amusement and scoff, “No you don’t. Come on, give me one good hiccup.” And more often than not, you will do your damnedest to produce one hiccup as proof and fail utterly. He will grin knowingly, and you will be cured.

Unfortunately for me and my airways last week, his line was busy. As I continually dialed his number, heard the busy signal, hung up and tried again, hiccupping myself into oxygen deficiency, I had a very clear and quiet thought:

Who will cure my hiccups when Grandpa is gone?

If I had been thinking about his illness, I never would have gone near that thought, but my distracted brain brought it to the surface. After I recovered from both my hiccups and the shock of accepting that someday, probably sooner but hopefully later, Grandpa would be gone, I wondered if I would look back on that moment as one of the turning points, akin to my realization on the inn’s porch in the rain. I think that may be the moment when at least a small part of me stops fighting, stops being so scared and so angry, and acknowledges that somehow there will be a world without this person, whom I have spent my whole life loving.

The gratitude for a life, well-lived and well-loved, is an immense thing. Somehow, though, in my experience, the grief for a life lost is louder, at first. It is aggressive and must be ridden out, with the faith that ultimately what will be left is a quieter grief, which will heal, and a very large love, which will persevere.

A world without my grandfather is not one I would choose to live in, but eventually it’s a world I’ll have to live in. It will be a world where every day I think about how many of the pieces of who I am and how I live came from him. It will be a world where he lives in every moment of banter, every deck of cards, every mint julep, and countless other details.

And it will be a world where maybe someday I'll be able to level my eye on younger relatives in dry expectation and smile smugly when they are inexplicably and utterly unable to produce one good hiccup.

If you ask me, that's a pretty good legacy to uphold.