Grump

I wrote this a few weeks ago and did not open this blog since. We have been so busy. Visitors were in town for P's birthday and we just returned from celebrating LO's 2nd birthday in our hometown (more to come about that).

I was unsure if I would share this, but as I re-read it now, I think that I will. Because my Grandpa was bold, he inspires me to act a little more boldly too. Please excuse the sloppy writing. I haven't done any editing to this.


I miss you. I didn't even realize how much until tonight. Everything is quiet and as I got ready for bed, your beaming smile flashed into my mind and I can't escape the pain. Nor do I want to. I want to feel it because I want to never forget you. Grandpa or Grump, as I lovingly called you, I sob tonight for the past year we all have lived without you. I understood that it was your time to go. I mourned your death as I celebrated your very well-lived life.  I knew that it would be okay to not see you anymore, because frankly, in the end you weren't the man that I knew. The disease erased you in the present. You were no longer my Grump. At the end you became only the shell of the person you were. It was as if the core of you had left before your body followed suit.

LO will never know you the way I did. And for that reason I sob tonight. I wish she had the same privilege that I had to know you. The experience of eating ice cream out of a tub with you, of eating your bacon waffles (morsels of crunchy bacon mixed in the batter), of playing canasta with you as you hid cards in your suit sleeve or of walking on your back barefoot for the promise of a Dairy Queen Blizzard. You are woven in the fabric of my childhood. You were always there. To pick me up from school so that I wouldn't be humilaited to walk the five blocks home in high school (so silly, I know). To talk to me about the night you met Grandma at that dance club in Manhattan Beach and your friend pursued her first while you smoothly waited to make your move. Or to share the pain you felt when your father disowned you for joining the Army during World War 2. You were a first generation American with parents from Mexico and yet you felt as American as any other citizen. You loved this country. Almost as much as you loved your family. You were a strong man, stubborn until the end. Frank Sinatra's "My Way" describes your point-of-view perfectly. You came from East LA, selling newspapers, you really had no business getting a scholarship to the most prestigious mining engineering school. I love the picture of your college graduation with Grandma and your four young kids (another 3 would follow). You were so handsome - with a touch of over-confidence that I wish I had inherited. 

I love you Grump and I miss you. Still. You would get a kick out of my daughter. She has the same zest for life that runs through my veins and I'm pretty sure comes from you. She's funny, wicked sharp and as you would say "a character." I know you would love her like you loved me, unconditionally. You made me feel special. I just wish you could make her feel that way too. Because it meant very much. 

As I wipe these tears from my face, I am not quite sure why tonight was the night I mourned you again. It's an ordinary night, nothing triggered this downpour of memories and emotions. Maybe you came to visit me tonight. I feel your presence as I write this and somehow I just know that you were never really gone and that you won't ever really leave us. You are here, you live on in your wife - my beautiful Grandma - your seven children, 14 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren. I think it is most fitting that your next great grandchild will be born on your birthday. On October 3rd, Alessia will enter this world and share your birthday forever. 

You really did do it your way, Grump!