Grief

I feel very fortunate to have lost very few people in my life. Somehow though, the number being so small (3 main people come to mind) makes them feel infinitely more painful.

My grandfather died when I was 14 from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Although he was a tough, strict, often unkind father to my mom and her 3 brothers, he was a fabulous grandfather. I was the first grandchild and we had a very close relationship. We used to spend hours, he and my grandma and me, doing the daily jumble and wordsearch from the "funnies" section of the paper. As my grandmother's eyesight began to fail from the ravages of macular degeneration, he and I would sit at the kitchen table and race to see who could get all of the words found from the wordsearch first. I vividly remember the first time ever that I beat him.

I thought I was finally smart enough to beat him.

Little did I know, but the horrible yet-to-be-diagnosed-disease that would take him from me made it very hard to him to make the fine motor movements to circle the letters in the puzzle.

In addition to word games, my grandpa and I spent hours gardening. He was a fastidious (some would say anal retentive) gardener. His garden consisted of 3 main flowers - fuchsias, which hung from baskets around the carport each summer, roses, which lined the "boulevard" in front of his house, and dahlias, which were the crux of the main small garden. If you know anything about gardening, you know that roses and fuchsias are messy flowers. When they start to die, they drop their flowers. Grandpa thought that it was a sin to have a stray petal in your garden, or a dead fuchsia on the ground. God forbid the dahlias grew too tall and started to bend before you got around to staking them.

My grandpa was an A+ gardener though, and never was an errant petal in the dirt for more than a day. The dahlias were staked from day one, and once weekly they were re-tied. He would walk around every evening and pluck the dying fuchsia flowers before they had a chance to fall. I loved gardening with him.

This summer, two major things happened that made me miss my grandpa. My husband and I bought our first house together, and my grandma moved out of the house she and my grandpa had owned since 1960. I wanted nothing more than to have grandpa help me plant some roses in my yard. I dreamed of the previously-loathed one day per year at Fred Meyer where scads of people line up because they pot your fuchsias for you. He wasn't there to help me. Not only that, but the dahlias that I had faithfully tied up at his house every year since his death were ripped out by the new owner of the house to make room for more grass. I cried over the loss of some stupid flower bulbs. Of course, it wasn't the bulbs I missed. I missed the last connection I had to my grandpa. I knew each time I trimmed the roses and tied up the dahlias that he was proud of me, happy that the neighbors weren't walking past his garden and thinking "Jim never would have let the petals fall off the roses like that."

I miss him. I miss him more as an adult than I did as a self-centered teenager. I have a garden, both in my yard and in my heart, that needs some tending.