I look at Grandpa, sitting in his stressless chair, blankly watching an awful, jarring commercial for a wrestling video game, and I can’t gather my feelings correctly. I can’t make sense of this growing frustration, this ugly contempt that I feel welling up inside me. I know how bad that sounds, but there it is. There’s no use in pretending his giving up isn’t affecting us all.
He won’t get up in the mornings anymore. And if he does, he eats his breakfast, takes his pills, and gets back in bed, to Grandma’s distress. And these days, even her nagging, tinny insistence that he put on clean clothes and at least try to sit at the table with her while she reads the newspaper fails to persuade him. He’s exhausted, or woozy, he usually says. And it’s hard to tell whether he’s telling the truth, or lying, or whether that thin difference matters at all at this point.
I try to convince him to move around a little, using humor to hide my discomfort. I say that he can get her off his back by getting up and getting the little bit of exercise that the doctors say he needs. Let’s walk to the mailbox. Let’s go sit outside. But I can see that he doesn’t want to, and I capitulate, because I don’t have the heart to tell my Grandpa what to do. I’m embarrassed for him. I know that, at the very least, he must have given up on pride, and at the very worst, he’s willing death to come and swallow him up during the commercial break between segments of post-Monday night football analysis. I feel terrible, earlier in the day, standing in his bedroom, smelling his medicines, looking at the oxygen mask he sometimes puts on when he goes to sleep, knowing that he is preparing himself for another long, meaningless afternoon in the twilight of his life.
I don’t know what I expect him to do, this old man with a fat white, war-scarred globe of a belly, and reed thin, uncooperative legs. He’s not taking up tai chi or zen gardening. He’d rather keep his tangled up thorn bush of regret and fear in his dreams than lay it all out in memoirs. He’s read so many books that there’s no new revelation to be had, no new story to be heard. Even the news reports about hurricane damage in Galveston, or the op-ed pieces on the financial crisis are historical retreads for him. He knows what human tragedy is and what mortality truly means. And I know he’s disgusted with himself, more so than I am. So I stand there, watching him watch the television, and I day dream that I and my future wife die instantly, in a sudden, white-hot air balloon explosion 200 feet over the most beautiful valley in the world, on my 78th birthday, our will drawn up cleanly and agreeably, so that neither of us, nor our progeny, has to endure what my grandparents are enduring: the slow, shitty crawl into the grave.
