flashback, part 14 of n

My paternal grandmother was my introduction to death.

She had a stroke about a year before she died, and my father and his two brothers drew up a rotation, and two or three nights a week, we were over at my grandparents’ house making dinner and looking after the two of them. When she finally died, it was the first time I was cognizant of anyone I knew dying. (It didn’t help that Bear Bryant shuffled off this mortal coil before the month was out, too.)

Well, my grandfather had been more or less a subsistence farmer until the two boys were old enough for high school. At some point (I guess before the third was born, but not by much) he went to work in the steel business for a couple of decades. All this is by way of saying that when he found himself a widower at age 70, he was not really well-prepared for domestic life by himself. And so everybody continued to look after him – and in our case, that meant he came to dinner on Tuesday nights. It must have started that spring, but it was a going thing for over a decade – because in 1993, when I went to pick up my new Saturn, my first task after bringing it home was to go collect him for dinner.

I guess it must have petered out sometime while I was at Vandy, because I don’t think he was coming over by the time I came home that first summer. Of course, even though he was limited in how well he could take care of himself, he held on pretty good for another decade after that before dying only a day or two short of age 91. Given that three of my father’s four grandparents and his dad lived into their 90s, I’m pretty sanguine about the quality of my Y chromosome…of course, given how well-preserved my maternal relatives were despite decades of unfiltered cigarettes and radiation exposure, my X could be pretty money too.

Anyway, it’s flabbergasting to think that all that started over 25 years ago. There are big pivotal events in my life that were 2/3 of my life ago. When you contemplate how much time has gone by, it seems absurd that the midpoint of my life now is somewhere in my freshman year of undergrad, because that second half has FLOWN by comparison. But the wife has it right: every year goes by quicker than the last. All the more reason not to dawdle.