Kyle Garret

            This is what people do when someone dies: they make plans.

            One of my nephews, Connor, has surgery tomorrow to have his tonsils removed and to have tubes placed in his ears.  Since he and his parents need to be at the hospital extremely early in the morning, his twin brother Nathan is staying with my parents for the next 24 hours, or at least that had been the plan up until now.

            “Grandma Sherry is crying,” said Nathan earlier as my mom tried to put him to bed.  Her crying was making him cry, so she was forced to compose herself to get him to go to sleep.

            “Isn’t Meghan supposed to fly in on Tuesday?” says my dad.  Meghan is my cousin, my only cousin, and she’s very close to my grandfather.  She’s very close to him because both of her parents are dead and grandma and Papa have been the only major link she has to this side of her family.

            “Jesus,” I say.

            He just wanted to make it home by Thursday.  He just wanted to make it home so he could see his grandson who was visiting him from California.           

            “I can’t imagine the funeral will be before Monday,” says my mom and I can’t believe she’s talking about her father’s funeral.  I can’t believe that I’m sitting in my parents’ living room in Ohio and I’m having a conversation about when my grandfather’s funeral is going to be and how long I’ll have to extend my trip to make sure I can be there.

            Nicole and I had been 15 hours away from seeing Papa.

            Nicole opens a bottle of wine.  She pours my mom a glass.  It’s a bottle that Nicole and I will finish off by ourselves as my parents get ready for bed, get ready for the morning to come.

            And now we’re lying in bed in my old bedroom, a room which has long since lost any resemblance to what it was over a decade ago when I called it my own.  We’re lying in bed and I’m drunk on wine and I honestly have no idea what to do with myself.

     *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    * 

            Nathan’s other grandmother takes him in the morning.  My mom heads to Dayton that afternoon.  I ask her if she’ll be okay and she tells me that the drive will do her some good.  My dad, Nicole, and I are to follow the next day, after we’ve made all the necessary arrangements allowing us to do so.

            I spend most of the day on the phone and online.  We have bosses to call, friends to call, an airline to call.  I send a mass e-mail to the extended family letting them know what has happened and that the funeral service will be Monday morning.

            Nicole and I pack that night because this is the last we’ll see of my parents’ house; we’ll leave for Los Angeles directly after the funeral.  I have a knot in my stomach and I don’t know that I’ve ever been so hesitant to leave my parents’ house.

            I’ll admit that I just want to go back to Los Angeles.  I want to run away.  I know that it’s unhealthy and in many ways cowardly, but living so far away from my family and friends places me in a position where I don’t actually have to live with anything painful on a daily basis.  When someone dies it hurts, but it’s not something that sticks with me every day because I don’t have any reminders of them like that.  When my uncle died it was horrible for a number of reasons, but I saw him for maybe four days out of the year.  In my head, for the other 361 days in a year, he was alive and well and I just didn’t see him.

            I just want to run back to Los Angeles so I can forget all about this.  But I know that it’s not possible, not this time, not with my grandfather.  He has become too much a part of my life for me to escape this.

            We reschedule our flights for Monday night.  We drive down to Dayton on Friday morning.

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            My grandmother slips from sad to fine in the span of seconds.

            “Grandma, what can I do?” I say.  Right now it’s just the immediate family.  Those who are coming in early will arrive on Sunday.

            “Just be sweet,” she says as she pats my hand.  “Just be sweet.”

            In many ways I think this is how my grandfather saw me, too.  I was the youngest, the most prone to flights of fancy, and I think they viewed me as being something of a free spirit, but not so much so that I was irresponsible.  Maybe they knew how emotional I could be.  Maybe they just assumed the fact that I was a writer meant I viewed the world differently than most.  But my grandmother was simply asking me to set a tone for her, to create a mood that would help her get through the next few days.

            “He tried so hard,” she says as she continues to pat my hand, “he tried so hard to get home to see you.”

            She starts to cry and I pat her hand in return.  “I know,” I say.

            This should have had me in tears, but this moment isn’t about me.  Right now I feel like crying would be selfish.  These next few days are about grandma, about my mom.  They’re not about me.

            “Here you go, mom,” says my mom as she hands grandma a piece of paper.  Grandma has slipped back to being fine again.  I suppose that’s inaccurate; she’s only fine on the surface.

            “Thank you, dear,” says grandma as she sets the piece of paper on the counter in front of her.

            There’s a breakfast bar in my grandparents’ kitchen.  Grandma is on the kitchen side of it, standing up.  I’m on the dining room side of it, sitting in a bar chair.  It’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember; they’ve been in this house for nearly forty years.  The plan of this moment, however, is that grandma will sell the house and move up to Kent to be closer to my parents.

            It dawns on me that when I leave on Monday I will never see this house again.

            I look down at the piece of paper my mom just gave to my grandma.  It’s Papa’s discharge paper.

            I pick it up and look it over.

            Robert Merwin Stuart.  I had no idea his middle name was Merwin.

            “Goldy and Seth couldn’t decide on a middle name, so they named him after the doctor that delivered him,” says grandma when I ask.

            Box 24 under Service Data lists “Decorations, Medals, Badges, Commendations, Citations, and Campaign Ribbons Awarded or Authorized”.  The list is fairly long.

            “The medals are probably around here somewhere,” says grandma.

            “Do you think I could have a copy of this?” I say.

            “They’re going to make a copy at the funeral home,” she says.  “You can have this one when I bring it back.  I’m sure I have another copy somewhere.”

            Even as I’m writing this I can smell their house.  I can smell the basement, at least, which is where Papa kept all of his papers, his photos, and more than likely his medals.  I can smell it as if I were sitting there right now.

            “I’ve got a bunch of old photos I can give you, too,” says grandma.

            “Anything you want to send me, anything you think I could use, I’d love to have,” I say.

            “I will,” she says.  “You’re the next generation; no sense in me keeping it.”

            She pats me on the hand again.

            “It’s good,” she says as she smiles at me.  “It’s good that you’re interested in these things.”

    *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *

            “Thank you for staying,” I say.

            “Of course,” says Nicole.  I don’t really know what I’d be doing right now if she hadn’t decided to stay.

            We’re lying in bed in a hotel room.  This room has been something of a godsend for us, as it’s become a sanctuary.  In this hotel room we can actually be alone for a little while.  We can just be together and put everything else on hold, if only for a few hours.

            Huber Heights – the suburb of Dayton where my grandparents live – is a small town and the complete darkness and lack of white noise is unsettling.

            “You haven’t really reacted yet,” says Nicole.  “I want to make sure I’m with you when you do.”

            “I know,” I say.  “Honestly, I don’t know that it will happen until I get back to Los Angeles and write about all of this.”
            “You don’t have to hold it in for that,” she says.

            “I’m not.  Believe me, I’m not.  It’s just that right now I keep thinking about my grandma.  I didn’t see Papa that often, but grandma spent every day of her life with him for sixty-one years.  How do you deal with something like that changing completely?”

            “I hope I go first,” says Nicole.  “Because I don’t think I could handle that.”

            “I wouldn’t want you to.”

            The CD player on my laptop is playing.  The speakers are obviously not the best, but we needed some kind of music, some kind of noise to help us fall asleep.

            Nicole drifts off to sleep, her breathing getting heavier as she loses consciousness.  The Postal Service is playing, a song called “We Will Become Silhouettes,” the last song on the album.  My mind had been wandering, but comes back to the music in time for the final chorus: “We will become silhouettes when our bodies finally go.”

            The night before my other grandmother’s wake, I had a dream about her.  I wonder if I’ll dream about Papa.