About a month ago, I walked into my grandparents’ apartment and handed my grandfather a plastic baggie from behind his armchair. He held it up to examine its contents: three thick, brown ponytails, each about fifteen inches long.
“You did it!” he congratulated me. I’d been threatening to cut off all my hair for the better part of a year. What I had learned from getting a tattoo is that the longer and more loudly you threaten to do something out of the ordinary, the more ordinary it is when you finally do it.
I came around to stand in front of my ultimate patriarch, and his eyebrows rose as he saw the broad swath of indigo blue I had dyed into what was left of my hair.
After a moment, he asked dryly, “What’d you do, fall on your head and bruise your hair?”
I’ve gotten quite a bit of positive reinforcement concerning my hair since I cut it, but his stamp of approval will always be my favorite.
Later that night, I was on the couch, trying not to get in anyone’s way. My parents, my aunt, and my grandmother were all exhausted, on edge, and trying to hide all of the above. When I came that night, I had brought a bouquet for my grandmother, and someone had put the flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Grandpa was sitting in his armchair across the room, coming in and out of awareness, when he suddenly caught my eye and nodded at the arrangement, which was dripping with lilacs.
“Nice flowers,” he said simply, and quirked a wry smile at me.
All I had to do was smile back.
It was an entire conversation in two words and two nearly identical grins.
In a way, those last two interactions—the hair and the flowers—were perfectly representative of our relationship: sarcastic, dry, understated, but always with an essential underpinning of love and approval. Our exchanges that night were so much more genuine than the constant, fearful refrain of my telling him I loved him, which I had been doing with more and more panic as he got sicker and sicker. He already knew that I loved him—of course he did.
And anyway, self-conscious sentimentalism just wasn’t his style.
I wish so badly that I could draw together some definitive statement, a coherent narrative, about what my grandfather’s life meant to me, but it all comes out in bits and pieces: ski lessons, angel food cake, shuffling cards, Ford Explorers, and the smell of mothballs. I think I’ve come to realize that the whole of his life in my life was so massive, so integral, that it’s difficult for me to wrap language around it.
But I wouldn’t be his granddaughter if I didn’t try.
Spending time with my family in the weeks after he died, I noticed that we all tried impersonating his voice and intonation, as though there simply wasn’t enough of him in the stories we were telling. We wanted to hear him, to be comforted by him, to keep the sound of him present in our lives. Over the weekend of his memorial service, one thread in the countless stories became clear: the events in our lives may have been separated by decades and continents—from stories beginning with “so there I was in Pago Pago” to Indiana canoe trips ending up in jail—but our experience of his immersive, unconditional, dryly hilarious love was constant.
What I began to understand intuitively a long time ago, but only articulated after he died, was how much that love said not about us, but about him.
Recently, I got a new phone, and my voicemails didn’t transfer over. Before they were lost in the ether, I managed to record onto my new phone the only one I wanted to save; the one I knew was there, but that I didn’t have the courage to listen to until recently. Grandpa was nearly deaf for my entire life, and in spite of a successful cochlear implant, he still didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. As a result, he only called when he himself had something important to say. In this case, he had just learned about my GRE scores, and he was calling to congratulate me and to tell me that he was sure I would end up in Williamstown yet. At that point, Williams was still my first choice, and when I got the message, I wept with relief, because if he believed it, maybe I could let myself hope too.
Months later, he was honest to God equally as thrilled when I accepted an offer from Colorado.
What he wanted for me was not prestige. Prestige is inherently selfish, and there has never been a man in this world less selfish than my grandfather. What he wanted for me, what he wanted for all of us, was that we do everything we could do be the best version of ourselves: to be responsible, to be kind, to be honest, and to be happy. He was invested in nothing more than our integrity and our happiness. When I think about what that meant about his own integrity, his lack of ego, and the breadth of his love for all of us, it makes my chest truly, physically ache.
And that doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that he was the funniest, most charismatic old fart you ever met.
Every deck of cards, every ski lift, every voting ballot, every hiccup, every mint julep, and every piece of angel food cake I will ever encounter for the rest of my life will belong to him. He will be there every time I turn a card face down and smirk at the relative I have just beaten at gin, asking casually, “What's the name of the game?” Every time I purse my lips and arch one eyebrow to show amusement or correct a bill for being less than I owe, I’ll be channeling him directly.
I’ll try to make him proud, at least a little bit every day, and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.
I guess that’s just the name of the game.
In loving memory of
Jack Roberts
1923-2012
