If you were to ask my Grandma Burton which one of her grandchildren she loved the most, I would imagine she would respond in the following manner;
TJ turned out to be quite the trombone player, and grandma’s quickly dubbed him “Wonder Boy,” which she would shout any time he entered a room. During her own mother’s funeral, she pushed through all of her grandchildren like Moses parting the sea, grabbed TJ and screamed with utter delight “Hey Everyone! This is one I’ve been telling you about. This is Wonder Boy!” The rest of us were left in the dust completely un-miffed. We all looked at each other and thought the same thing; “Where’s the dead body?”
It was made clear to the rest of us grandchildren that if we were to compete for my grandmother’s affection, we better learn an instrument. We all dabbled here and there, but collectively agreed once we discovered my grandparents weren’t exactly Rockefellers, that the potential inheritance did not equal the shame of performing in the marching band. So instead, we all waited patiently for my brother to give up band, which would surely lead to his fall from grace. But much to our chagrin, TJ continued playing throughout college, and then after graduating became a band teacher – ensuring that none of us could ever de-thrown him.
Asking one of us if we were pissed that my grandma loved TJ the most would be like asking an Eskimo if he was sick of snow. We had grown up with it and accepted it as a way of life. My grandma would move heaven and earth to see any and all TJ related festivity – band concerts, plays, graduations, everything. If they had sold tickets to my brother losing his virginity, my grandma would have been there front row and center clapping her hands slowly and screaming “Wonderboy! Wonderboy!” She never really attended many of my functions, but her absence didn’t exactly bother me. During one of her visits, my parents made me show her one of my paintings from a recent art exhibit. She took one look at it, laughed and shouted “well that’s just about the ugliest little boy I’ve ever seen!” When my mother explained to her that it was suppose to be a girl, she laughed until I sulked out of the room.
Recently my grandparents moved from their large home in
“Hey Brother,” he said in his standard casual greeting. “Just thought I would let you know that grandma and grandpa got into a car accident.”
“WHAT!?” I screamed. “OH MY GOD! Are they…wait…which ones? Miles or
“The
“Oh…” I said. There was a brief pause. “Well, uh…yikes…Are they okay?”
“Well Grandma had a heart attack and grandpa broke his neck, but other than that they’re just fine.”
“Oh my God! Do I need to come down?”
“No, mom said that she thinks they’re going to be okay,” Matt reassured me. “I’m sure they’ll call you if they die or something.”
In the background I could hear his car door shut behind him. “Where are you? Are you going to see them?”
“No, I’m going to get drunk.”
“Well, do you think I would be a bad person if I went out and got drunk too?”
“No,” Matt said. “They would want it that way.”
The next morning my mother called to give me more details. My grandparents had only been a few minutes from my parents’ house when they got into the accident. Despite the fact that they have been there hundreds of times before, they decided to use the navigational system they had received for Christmas. It had taken them on a route they had never been on before, but they put their faith in it and followed it blindly. When it told them to take a long, windy gravel road - they did. And when it told them to proceed straight through an intersection – straight they went, straight through a red light. Another car slammed on their breaks to avoid hitting them, but knocked into the back of their car, flipping it over into a ditch on the side of the road. With the car on its side and a broken windshield, my elderly grandparents dangled precariously in their seats, above four inches of broken glass. When the paramedics arrived, they removed the roof to fish them out. When my mother told me this, I told her “At least they finally got that convertible they always wanted” – to which my mother informed me that my father, my brothers, my sister-in-law, my Uncle Ed, and one of the neighbor boys had all made the same joke. “And I didn’t think it was funny any of those times either.”
My grandparents were rushed to a nearby hospital, luckily only minutes away. My grandma, who had been driving, was shaken, but not seriously injured. The doctors did, however, find an enzyme in her heart that suggested she may have had, or was about to have a heart attack. They kept her overnight, and in the morning decided she was fine, and let her go home with my parents.
My grandpa on the other was not in such good shape. When my parents arrived at the hospital, they found him covered in glass and blood, strapped to a gurney, and yelling at the nurse who wanted to cut off his “good shirt.” My grandfather, usually a quiet and stoic man, was demanding painkillers to numb the pain. They refused to give him anything until they had determined the extent of his injuries, so there he laid, strapped to a hard board and unable to move, with bits of broken glass underneath him, all in his good play-seeing shirt. X-rays showed a small crack in his neck that would require surgery to repair. It wasn’t a Christopher Reeves break, but serious none the less. After his surgery, he remained in the hospital for a couple of days, and then was transferred to a recovery facility close to my parent’s house.
My mother insisted that neither I, nor my cousin Kelly needed to come down from
“I feel so bad!” She told me. I could hear her sniffling on the other end of the phone. “Our entire family is there, and we’re so far away.” Her tears moved me, so I agreed to go down with her the following weekend. I later found out that they were not tears but a minor sinus infection, and that Kelly was only planning to swing by briefly while she was in the area to see her boyfriend. I felt duped.
So I traveled down to
That night I reflected on my relationship with my grandfather. To be honest, I didn’t know much about the man. As infants, his mere presence inexplicably caused my twin brother and I to scream uncontrollably – which forced him to ride in a separate cars and eat alone in the kitchen whenever we were around. As children, we stopped screaming, but he still remained a mystery. He’s a quiet and gentle man, never speaking unless spoken to. He’s lost a lot of weight these last couple of years, but even still, he remains large – tall, broad, and brooding. Having advanced stages of Retinitis pigmentosa, he’s almost completely blind, and therefore doesn’t move unless absolutely necessary. He will get up to play a game of horseshoes though, where I’ve ever seen him lose a game. How? No one really knows, but it has led many of us to question his poor eyesight – or it did, until he took a shit in the bathroom sink.
When I was in middle school, my brown-nosing cousin John wrote a paper for one of his classes about my grandpa, entitled “My Grandpa - the Hero.” We made fun of him for his clear attempt to raise his rank in the will, but when I read it I learned a lot about my grandfather that I didn’t know. As a young man, he served in the US Army, stationed in
The next morning, a group of us went to see my grandfather in the recovery facility he had been transferred to. As we pulled into the parking lot, my grandmother pulled out a handicap sticker she had stashed away in her purse. It was one of the few items my Aunt Lisa had retrieved from their crushed vehicle. Lisa, being one of the thinnest of the family, had volunteered to crawl into the wreckage to recover some stuff that was left behind. She came back with an atlas, seven umbrellas, and most importantly, two handicap stickers the state of
“Oh yes it is!” she shouted after him as she slowly hoisted herself out of the car.
As we got out of the car, my mother informed us that recovery facility they transferred my grandpa too was technically a hospice.
“A Hospice?” I shouted. “Is grandpa dying?”
“No!” my mother sighed. “Hospices are more than where people go to die. They specialize in treating the elderly.”
Seconds later, we entered the foyer - filled to the brim with funeral bouquets. Every inch of table space, countertop, and windowsill was occupied with large flower arrangements, so many in fact, that many had to be stacked across the floor. Some of them still had banners on them, printed with messages like “our hearts are with you,” and “our deepest condolences.”
“Are you sure grandpa isn’t dying?” I asked my mother.
My mother stopped to examine one lily arrangement. “People just drop off the left over flower arrangements here after funerals.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Matt muttered under his breath. “We are in God’s Waiting Room.”
The group of us maneuvered through the field of death flowers like Dorothy walking through the poppy field. As we approached the double doors that led into the hospice, my mother stopped and turned around to address us all.
“Take a deep breath now while you can because it smells like urine in there.” As she said this, she noticed a dryer sheet clinging onto the freshly cleaned pair of pants that she had changed into earlier that afternoon. “Oh!” She said with a pleased look on her face. “Perfect!” She took the dryer sheet into her hand and spread it across her nose, paused and took a deep breath in, and then pushed the doors open.
Through the doors, the bright and cheerful foyer turned into a dark, dingy – yet sterile environment. There was no natural light - just the yellow hue coming from the florescent lights above. Everything was yellow, the walls, the ceiling, the people, even the air seemed to be yellow. The aroma of urine and cleaning fluid punched me in the face as soon as we entered. It was potent, just like my mother had warned. I saw my father come up behind her and try to steal her dryer sheet she had covering the bottom half of her face. “Get your own!” she shouted.
The hall was lined with the elderly people in their wheelchairs. They each sat facing the door, watching us with their sad dull eyes as we walked by. It was unsettling. These people were old. Very old. Unnaturally old. Looking at them, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps humans weren’t made to live this long. Their bodies were tiny and frail, with liver spots and wrinkles covering every inch of their gray flesh. I tried my best not to make eye contact as I walked by. It was easy to tell that each and every one of these people thought that we were the family they had forgotten. They would perk up in their wheelchairs, hoping that dementia had caused them to forget that they had full grown daughter and a grandson with a shaved head.
As we walked down the halls, we heard a low moaning sound coming from the room ahead. As we got closer, the moaning turned into shouting. It was a man, yelling “Jesus Christ! God Help me!” he repeated himself over and over again. “Jesus Christ! God Help me!” As we walked by the room, Matt and I both looked in. An elderly man lay on his side, his back to the door, completely nude. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted again.
Matt looked at me and shook his head. “Lord, please take me when I’m young.”
“That’s crazy! I was just thinking the same thing.” I beamed. I still, to this day, get excited when Matt and I share certain “twin” moments. It genuinely surprises me that as different as we are, he and I still, on occasion, share the same thoughts.
My mom turned around to squash our moment. “Oh please,” she whispered. “Like we all weren’t thinking the same thing!”
Finally, at the end of the hall we found our grandfather’s room. As we walked in, I heard a vaguely familiar sound. Something from my early childhood – loud and funky. Grandpa was lying in his hospital bed, a brace tightly wrapped around his neck and a remote in his hand. He was watching a rerun of Soul Train with the volume on as high as it would go.
I gave him a big hug and a gentle pat on the head. “Grandpa!” I shouted.
“Chris?” he asked. “Is that you? You didn’t have to come down to see me.”
”Grandpa? Are you watching Soul Train?” A busty black girl was on the TV gyrating her bare mid section.
“Soul train?” He said confused. “I thought this was the Redskins game.”
Grandma, who was trailing a good five minutes behind us, came into the room. She walked straight up grandfather and kissed him on the mouth. I didn’t bother averting my eyes, assuming it would be a quick peck. I was wrong though, and I accidentally observed the two of them full-on, open mouth make out. It lasted for what seemed like minutes. It was awful and disturbing. I had never seen two old people French before – especially not these two old people. Neither one of them was much for physical contact. In fact, the most interaction I had seen between the two of them was limited to when my grandma led my grandpa by the hand to the bathroom.
One of my brothers groaned. “Grandma, stop! I’m trying to watch Soul Train.”
My grandma sat down in a chair beside grandpa’s bed. “Well if you thought that was bad, you should have heard your grandfather on the phone with me at the hospital. It was during the first night that we were there. They had put your grandfather in one room and me in another. I called down to him and told him I loved him and I was I was there to hold his hand. And do you remember what you said Bob?” She asked my grandpa, who was now flipping through the channels to see if could find the actual Redskins game.
“Yup.” He said.
“He said...” My grandmother continued. “He said ‘I wish you were holding more than my hand!’”
“EWWWWWWW!” We all screamed with genuine horror.
My mom jumped in to explain. “He had just come out of surgery and was hopped up on morphine. He didn’t know what he was saying.”
“I knew what I was saying!” my grandpa snapped.
We hung out with my grandfather for an hour or so. The doctors had put him on serious painkillers that made him much chattier than usual. He talked about the Olympics, the comfort of elastic waistbands, and the “little foreign girl” that was helping him with his physical therapy. The entire time, my grandmother sat beside him, stroking his hand and looking at him longingly. It was strange watching my grandparents interact in this way – acting like they liked one another. Before this, if asked to describe their feelings towards one another, I would have said “mildly partial.” I had always assumed they had stayed together for so long for the very same reasons that that morbidly obese man stayed on the same couch for decades – because after years of immobility, his skin grew into the couch cushions. That man and the couch became one – not because they loved one another, but because it was too hard for that man to get off the sofa and find somewhere else to sit. But watching them together, kissing, holding hands, I realized that I had completely misjudged them. They clearly still loved each other – had always loved each other, and even after 50 some years together, probably always will love each other. It was touching. Nauseating, but touching.
After an hour or so, my grandmother began to complain about her blood sugar being low, so we all said good bye to my grandfather. I gave him a big hug and told him to feel better, and he told me to make him proud. It sadden me to think that at this stage in my life, that most likely won’t happen, but I swallowed my feelings of failure, and said goodbye.
I had learned a lot about my grandparents in this quick trip home. I’ve always been extremely lucky to be so close to them growing up. They’ve always been there – readily accessible for me, but even still I feel like I hardly know them. I mean, sure I know them, but I’ve never really seen them as real people, with actual feelings and emotions. To me they had always been just grandma and grandpa, handers out of lottery tickets and wearers of funny Christmas socks. But witnessing the two of them together, I got to see that they are genuine. They’re real people. Old people. Very old. But people none-the-less.
I looked at my grandma as we drove away. She and I were both piled up in the back seat of my parents SUV, and she was rummaging through her purse to find a granola bar she always kept with her for when her blood sugar gets low. She and my grandfather are both diabetic, so there’s always an emergency stash of food that follows them. I could see sadness in her eyes as she dug through her bag – realizing that she would have to spend another night alone, away from my grandfather. I had never seen her like this, so raw and tender, so sweet and full of love.
I reached over and grabbed her purse from her. She looked at me with confusion. “Give grandma back her bag.” she told me. “I need that granola bar.”
“Tell me you love me,” I demanded.
She stopped. Looked at me suspiciously and leaned in. “What did you say?
“I said...Tell me that you love me!”
She let out one of her signature HA!’s and went to swipe the bag from out of my lap. I jerked it back to keep it out of her reach.
“Tell me that you love me or I’m eating this granola bar old woman!” I reached in and grabbed the bar from within her bag and began to unwrap it.
“Fine!” she said reluctantly. “I love you!”
I began to hand the bag back to her, but as she reached for it, I pulled it back again.
“More than TJ?” I asked.
“What?!” She shouted.
“Do you love me more than TJ?”
“Fine! Yes! More than TJ!” She yelled as she grabbed the purse from my hands.
“I love you too Grandma.”
“You’re really something else, you know that.” She said as she took a bite of the granola bar. “Something else alright.”
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