Hello friends,
Yesterday, I went to my grandpa's funeral. He died last week after a hard battle with cancer. His death evoked a strange feeling in me. I never knew him that well—not like my mom, uncle, and grandma knew him. As a kid, I begged my parents not to make me go to his house. He was a hard man, and I wasn't used to that. He was also of that generation of Southerners who were shamelessly racist, which, of course, made me angry. And although my mom converted to Judaism before she married my dad, her family is very Christian. They always say grace before meals and pray to Jesus, and as a little Jewish kid, that made me a bit uncomfortable.
Over the past few years, though, my grandpa mellowed out quite a bit. When his son, my uncle, died, he took it hard, and I think I saw for the first time how sensitive he was. He may have been a hard man, but he loved his kids more than anything. He fell into a deep depression, and shortly after that, he found out he had cancer.
We talked once about depression. He told me he used to think it was a load of crap. He thought it was an excuse people used when they were too lazy or weak to snap out of it and get shit done. After my uncle died, though, he learned that there is no snapping out of it. That was one of the very few times I ever heard my grandpa admit he was wrong.
A couple of years ago, I asked my grandpa for info about his family so I could work on our family tree. He told me he had a whole box of information that various family members had collected and invited me over to look through everything. That box was a gold mine of names, photos, and stories. While I looked at pictures of my grandpa's parents, he told me how his mom died when he was young, and his dad sold everything to support his family. My grandpa was a poor farmer in rural Alabama who came from a long line of poor farmers. He had nothing. He lived a life of difficulties most of us can't imagine. And while he told me about his life, he started crying. I had never seen him cry before. Through his tears, he told me he knew he was a hard man to live with, but he did his best with what he was given. I held back tears of my own as I listened to the voice of the toughest man I ever knew crack with emotion.
I didn't cry when my mom called me to tell me her dad finally died. I didn't cry at his funeral. Most of my sadness came from seeing my mom in pain. But listening to the stories everyone told about my grandpa, I felt an overwhelming sadness that I never knew the man they talked about.
And just like that, as I sit here writing about him, tears fall down my face. I'm a crier. I cry at everything. But I didn't expect to cry for this man I barely knew. Grief is a funny thing.
After you read this, I hope you tell the people in your life how much you love them. I hope you ask them to tell you stories. I hope you get to know them before it's too late.
I don't know how to end this email, but most endings aren't as neat and tidy as we'd like. So I'll leave it at that, and I'll see you next week.
Yardena