Today my grandfather died. He was 90 years old, or so few months shy that you’d be deeply neurotic to say different. He’d been in poor health for a long while now and I believe he was staying alive more out of politeness than anything else. Above all he was a very polite, kind and gentle man.
I’ve been around a few dead, and a few dying, people in my time. Somehow watching my grandfather on his deathbed was a lot more terrible than watching a guy in his twenties or thirties fight for his life after an accident or a stabbing or a diabetic coma. A young man, however serious his condition, somehow at least gives the impression of having some life force to fight back with. My grandfather at his last was skeletally thin, his skin a motley grey and blue and his body drained of will and power to live.
I saw him hours before he died. He was unconscious, but we can never know what he heard of our bedside chatter. My grandmother, who has been suffering from dementia for a while, was looking for a younger version of him or, when convinced that the man in the hospital bed was indeed her husband, trying to convince my mother that he was cold and should wear a shirt out of a misguided sense of decency. I have no knowledge of how dementia feels for the afflicted, but I hope against hope she won’t live out her days discovering every day, for the first time, that her husband is dead.
As I alluded to earlier I feel pretty sure my grandfather was ready to die and had been for some time. Although he was a gentle, kind and unassuming man he had always been a real man in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Not a Clint Eastwood and not a Frank Sinatra. Not even a working-class hero. He was a real man in the sense of a man who becomes an engineer because it’s a sensible way to make a living for himself and his family. A real man who could fix a bike or a lawnmower properly and had a workshop in the basement, not because he wanted to spend a lot of time in a workshop but because it’s good to have access to the proper tools to mend things around the house and fix things that are broken. A real man who, when my mother was young and the first Italian influence was introduced to the Norwegian kitchen, wanted potatoes with his spaghetti; Without potatoes it wasn’t a real dinner. I think being emasculated by age, and feeling his memory and wits slowly disappear over the last few years drained him of his will to go on, and in the end he only clung to life out of concern for my grandmother.
I was lucky to get to spend a lot of time with my grandfather in my childhood. Norway is a very long country, and we lived initially in opposite ends of it, but as I turned nine our family moved to Oslo and in fact moved right next door to my grandparents. When I was a toddler my grandfather built me a swing in the tree out in their garden. He built me a sandbox out of four great logs and he let me “help” by holding the other end of the saw, or assist with digging a trench for the log with my little shovel. We were doing it together. When I was older he took me out into the woods to find suitable bits of wood to make bows and slingshots and boomerangs, and he told me stories from the huge tomes of fairy tales and folklore he had procured for his grandchildren.
My grandfather was, as my grandmother still is, a deeply religious person. Those who read this blog regularly or know me in person know that I am not a fan of religion. If religion had always manifested itself as it did with my grandparents I would have no problems with it. In fact I would celebrate it, even as a non-believer. These pious people have been confronted with an atheist daughter who chose to marry a communist from Tromsø , a granddaughter who married a dark-skinned, divorcee from Madagascar, a lesbian granddaughter and a borderline criminal grandson who fathered a child out of wedlock. And they loved us all. Unconditionally and without judgment. No sermons, no evangelism, no attempts to make us “better our ways”. Just love.
They spent last christmas with me, my ex and our bastard child. Truth to be told the question of whether or not we were going to marry, or perhaps already were married came up several times since my grandmothers memory isn’t all it was, but every time we told her that; No. There won’t be a wedding. We have a child together, but we’re just friends now. She’d reply “Oh. Alright. I didn’t know that”. A couple of times she’d laugh and say “Hah hah… It wasn’t like that when we were young!”.
My grandfather, sadly, was already beyond involving himself in such topics. As I’ve already stated; He was a very polite man and wouldn’t want to burden the company with the fact that he had trouble following the conversation, or indeed remembering the last ten years. Still, whenever he saw the baby that unbeknownst to him was his great-grandchild crawling around on the floor giddy with the glamour of paper wrappings and new toys he would light up and make funny noises at her or pat her lovingly on the head. I think he communicated more with her than with the rest of us that evening.
These old coots. These two nonagenerians. They are truly the salt of the earth, for all that metaphor is worth nowadays. They have, or had, a decency towards their fellows and an approach to new people that puts me to shame in some ways. In short, these people are the embodiment of all the things I see that is good about religion and none of the things that makes me oppose it.
Kurt Vonnegut has a great quote detailing what he would like to tell all newborn babies if he had the chance:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. About kindness and consideration for fellow human beings and how so much of the worlds problems would just go away if we had all been born with Vonneguts words in mind. My grandfather was the model of kindness on which I think Vonnegut would have modeled his introduction to life for all the babies.
I guess I could go on waxing poetic about my grandfather for a while, but I shan’t. He was a sterling guy and I am glad to have had him in my life. Now that he passed on I’m glad it only passed a day from him entering what we knew would be his deathbed until he was relieved. If I’m wrong and the bible is right, you’d be hard pressed to find even a fundamentalist sect of Christians that wouldn’t agree that this man should have his place in heaven. If I’m right he will live on in our hearts and minds. If that sounds like a platitude it’s because clichés become clichés because they’re often true.
Rest in peace, Hans Gammelsæter.
