The summer after college graduation was a trying time for me. I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to live in my home state, I struggled finding a job with a pointless major, and I was losing money fast. Mostly because I was working a part-time retail job and having too much fun, seeing my paychecks regularly regurgitated after too many nights of drinking with friends in Seattle.
On one of those nights, I was out celebrating a friend’s pre-birthday-birthday, and the group finally settled in on my living room floor at 3am. The next morning we had to drop off a friend, and then return for the Bite of Seattle festival that afternoon.
As we were approaching my friend’s house I received a call from my mom. “That’s odd,” I thought, “why is she calling my cell at 10am on a Sunday?” I would assume that for most people, the idea of their parents calling them at what they consider an “off time”, is most likely for one reason—bad news. And my mom is the last person you want to hear bad news from, because the poor woman can’t do it with only 300 words—she’ll work herself up to the point that you’ve been on the phone an hour, and then she finally tells you what’s up.
“Grandpa Nick died yesterday,” she said. This had actually not come as a shock to me, since my grandfather’s health had been ailing the entire spring quarter of my senior year.
He had suffered a really bad fall that March. A neighbor found him at home, sprawled out in his living room, hours later. Not to further complicate the story, my step-grandmother was out as usual, leaving him on his own feeling worried and alone. After the incident, my mom and my aunt decided it was best to place him in an assisted living community, where he had caregivers to watch after him when his family couldn’t.
The armoire knows all
The only problem with his housing situation was that he loved the familiarity of his belongings and wanted to be in his own home more than his new one. He fought regularly with my step-grandmother to move some of his favorite furniture into his new apartment. The key piece being an armoire that was moved out of his house, into his apartment by my family, only to be carted back to his house by my step-grandmother’s grandsons. It was an ugly situation, and all for an old armoire.
A few months went by and the family learned that my grandfather’s kidneys and liver started to fail. He went in for surgery in early July, and I visited the hospital a few days after he came out of surgery. He passed away two weeks later.
As if my summer wasn’t difficult enough as a newly graduated 20-something, confused, ashamed, broke, confused…the news of his death was difficult, but I couldn’t help but wonder why I hadn’t fully emoted yet. It really disturbed me that a week had gone by and even after reminiscing with family before the funeral, I hadn’t shed a single tear yet. I’d come to find out that my mom, my aunt and my cousins felt the same way.
His will indicated that he wanted to be cremated with a service at the nearest veteran’s cemetery. I’d only attended two other funerals in my life, so I wasn’t sure what to expect for a deceased veteran.
In proper military tradition, the service was concluded with a 21–gun salute. The silence was broken, and finally there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
My work schedule was pretty lax, as usual, in the days following the funeral. This allowed for extra time to help the family sort through trinkets and photographs from his old house. Among them were the letters my grandmother saved from his time away in India during World War II, his old drafting kit, and many souvenirs from the cross-country trip he took with my mom from Seattle to Boston. I kept his bronze four-leaf clover keychain from New York and made a copy of an early photograph of my grandparents before they were married.
Salvaging all of those memories made me realize how remarkable my grandfather’s life was. He kept himself occupied with world travel, golf, a Toastmaster’s membership, piano lessons, and sailing.
He was also vehemently conservative and it didn’t take much to offend the man. Anytime a noted singer put their own spin on the national anthem, say Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl—he considered it “butchering” and sacrilegious.
He also had a soft side, which I always found uncommon in a man of his generation. But he lived and survived the Depression and two World Wars, who can blame him for tearing up over a Hallmark commercial or memories of his beloved dog Happy Hound?
Not long after searching his house for old treasures, my mom called me to say that some random boxes were left in the driveway while my parents were at work. They were of course deliveries from my step-grandmother.
I happened to stop by my parent’s house a few days later to check out the mysterious boxes. “I thought we cleared out everything?,” I asked. “Remember the armoire?,” my mom asked, “I guess these boxes had some extra stuff from the drawers. Some of the other boxes were leftovers from his apartment.” I couldn’t resist another treasure hunt, except this time there were no treasures to be had. I decided to give up on the hunting. It took up most of August that year, I was getting bored with it and I wanted to spend the remainder of my summer outside the confines of my parent’s garage.
In October, I stopped by their house to borrow a suitcase for an upcoming trip. As I made my way in through the garage, something caught my eye. I stopped my mom in the laundry room–
“The garage, umm….what the hell is with the box full of porn?!”
“They’re leftover from Grandpa Nick’s armoire, remember? We still had all of those other boxes we didn’t bother to open. I came across them a few weeks later.”
The magazines—and I mean enough to contain about 2-3 year’s worth of issues—weren’t soft core, or recent for that matter. The sweet, conservative man I knew for 22 years was in fact a purveyor (or should I say per-veyor) of “Hustler” issues from the late 80’s-early 90’s. The Desert Storm edition was quite laughable, as were the scrunchi-ed hairstyles and mile-high g-strings (I guess the term ‘low rise’ didn’t apply back then).
I had a good laugh with my mom about his secret stash for about an hour. And that was my final memory of Grandpa Nick.
Tags: armoire, death, family secrets, grandpa, posthumous
