Learning About Love

What are you supposed to do when someone you're angry at dies?--my brother asked me last week.

My grandfather died on Dec. 29, early in the morning. He died in his sleep. At 3 a.m. he stopped breathing as he slept in his own bed in Lincoln, Massachusetts. I had said goodbye to him on Dec. 16 before I left for home, San Francisco.

I kissed him as I left and told him I loved him for the first time in a long time. He didn't answer. His skin was stretched tightly over his skull--he looked like death.

My grandfather was a doctor--a very good and very dedicated doctor--at Massachusetts General Hospital. He went to Harvard, was Business Manager of the Harvard Crimson and a member of the Fox Club. He lived in Leverett House too, E-entry. I was hoping to get his old room next year in the lottery. He used to ask why I kept switching rooms, since he lived in the same ones for three years.

Between The Crimson, Harvard and the local news you would think my grandfather and I would have a lot to talk about. But he was interested in football and golf and I rarely pick up the sports section. Freshman year he kept asking me about this big pile of dirt in the back of Soldier's Field. I never found out what they were building out there--after Harvard-Yale I never even crossed the Anderson Bridge. Beyond my half-hearted attempts to keep up with the football, my grandfather and I never had much to say to each other.

When he started to get sicker this fall, he'd swear angrily at me if I asked him how he was.

"Don't f***** ask me that," he'd say. "I feel like shit, I don't want to talk about how I am and you don't want to hear about it."

It's a reflexive greeting, "Hi, how are you?" Try not saying "you're welcome" when someone thanks you. Nearly impossible. I had myself pretty well trained until I slipped up a week before I saw him for the last time. By that time he was bed-bound and having trouble breathing, so his vitriol didn't have its normal force. What was worse, his anger, or his anger at not being able to express his anger?

My grandfather would hate me writing this column. But he never read any of my writing as far as I can tell. He never bought me a Christmas present, never asked me how classes were going or showed much interest in my daily life. But he did teach me how to dig up potatoes, fix toilet plumbing, catch Japanese beetles at twilight in a jam jar. How to talk to a dying man. That's slowly, waiting until he has caught his breath, not asking too many questions, getting him water or melted sherbet, sitting quietly, being there. Switching on the golf at two.

My grandfather took a long time dying. This whole fall semester he was in decline. I wonder if I seemed callous to my roommates.

"How's your grandfather?" they'd ask.

"He's not dead yet," I'd reply with a smirk.

I felt like him.

You don't want to hear how he is. How he can't make it to the bathroom by himself anymore, how the side of his face harbors a gaping unhealing wound--the result of an operation to remove a cancerous growth. As if that was more life-threatening than the fact his bone marrow was no longer producing blood cells.

How he stopped going to church this week, how he stopped driving his trash to the dump the next, how he stopped getting up for lunch, then breakfast, then at all.

My grandfather is my first dead person. Other dead people have been peripheral, siblings of friends or relatives twice removed. Other people's mothers, other people's grandparents.

It's been a week and I'm still not sure how to feel about it.

I don't want to remember my grandfather as a saint, or hold him bitter against my heart. I'll remember him as he was, alternately angry and loving, teacher and student as I guided him through the intricacies of e-mail on his orange iMac. This way I can keep learning from him, remembering him when I keep people I love at a distance, or when I don't. His death is tragic because there was much more he could have taught me, and because I didn't learn enough while he was alive.

He wasn't the best grandfather, but he wasn't the worst. And I wasn't the best granddaughter, but I know he thought I wasn't the worst either.

I have distinct memories of him calling me on my birthdays and telling me he loved me.

Meredith B. Osborn '02 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.