The old man doesn’t notice me when I come into the room. He’s eating his breakfast, and food has always been his number one priority. He chews in the slow, methodical fashion of an elderly person with dentures — his eyes are big and wide as he eats, his thoughts focused only on the task at hand. He is thinner than I remembered — just crinkled reddish tan flesh stretched over his skeleton. His bony arms tremble as he uses them to cut his sausage, scoop up his scrambled eggs. Despite everything he’s done, I can’t bring myself to feel anything but pity.

I step further into the room and he looks up at me. It’s clear he doesn’t know who I am, but he’s trying to place my face. I’m familiar, but only barely so.
“How’re ya doin’?” I say in the faux-cheerful voice of an adult talking to a young child. “They treating you well in here?”

He offers a nervous smile, eyes shifting as he tries to figure out who I am. Finally, his eyes light up — something clicks. He says my name.

“Yup, that’s me,” I tell him. “Your grandson.”

I pull up the big easy chair to his bedside, and he begins to tell me about life in the hospital. He hates it — he wants out. But the food is good. They were trying to starve him yesterday — he had an MRI — but today they say he can eat as much as he wants. He thinks he might wrap up a couple sausages in a napkin — you know, so he can eat if they don’t feed him. I assure him that they’re definitely going to feed him. Not to worry.

Over the next hour or so, he recounts his hospital ordeal. About how for some crazy reason, he thought he was at a train station where the conductor was an African American woman. But he doesn’t call her that — he uses a racist epithet I won’t repeat. His friend John C. was there, and so was my mother. He doesn’t remember how he got from the train station to the hospital.

“That didn’t really happen,” I tell him. “That was a hallucination — like a waking dream. You were really sick, so your mind made that up.”

I try to explain to him how the arteries in his neck are blocked, how the lack of blood makes his brain do funny things — see things that aren’t really there.

Just as I think he’s getting it, a man — possibly in his sixties — enters the room. He wears a meshback baseball cap that says “USA” in red, white and blue letters, and is missing his top row of teeth and half of the bottom row. I get up and introduce myself to him, shaking his meaty hand. He doesn’t tell me his name, which strikes me as kind of rude. But then, I’m programmed for business etiquette — I introduce myself to people all the time. Hagerstown is at its heart a small town. People do things differently there than in Washington, D.C.

He sits down next to my grandfather and starts telling him about how he needs to see a local politician about the capital gains taxes he owes on a property he’s sold. My grandfather listens intently, but clearly doesn’t understand a word he’s saying. He nods along, though, and laughs at the appropriate cues. I wonder how long he’s been playing this game — pretending to know what people are talking about when he clearly doesn’t get it. I should have noticed it before, but even when I was with him before, I never paid attention to him.

The man begins a long tirade about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. “I hated Bill Clinton,” he says, “and I voted for Bush because I thought we needed a change. But now things are even more messed up than before. Clinton disgraced the office of President, but Bush is doing things that our country doesn’t need.”

I tell him I agree with him, and begin offering my own insights. He blinks and looks confused — I realize how much my knowledge of politics and foreign policy dwarfs his, begin to feel embarrassed that I’ve said too much. Sometimes I forget what things are like at home — how different my education and experience and use of language makes me from the working class people I grew up with.

Eventually, the man leaves. I chat some more with my grandfather, and notice the nurses keep walking by and looking in, giggling at me. One of them actually calls me out and asks me questions about my grandfather I know she already knows the answer to — just to talk to me. She giggles all along and smiles. I’m reminded of Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly, and how the ship’s female backwoods mechanic has a crush on the dandy cityslicker doctor. I realize that my Steve Madden shoes, gray turtleneck and Danish-made designer glasses must make me look very successful and appealing to a nurse in Hagerstown. I wonder what she would have made of me back in high school.

Not long after, another visitor enters — a woman from my grandfather’s church. I introduce myself, but again, she doesn’t tell me her name. My grandfather tells her the story about the train station, and she explains to him about how the lack of blood to his brain is causing the hallucinations. Her reaction is almost identical to mine, except in regards to the race of the conductor.

“I never heard of no black conductor before,” she says, laughing.

I realize I am very far from Washington, D.C.

——————————————————————————–

The rest of the day is spent off and on with my grandfather. My relations are due late in the evening, but despite my need to confront them, I decide to go home. There will be time for that later. My coworkers frantically email me with questions, and I have a publication that needs to be proofed. And I miss Tina and the dog. So I convince my mom to take me back to the Shady Grove Metro station so I can go home.

I stop by to say goodbye to my grandfather. He tears up when he hears I’m leaving — he’s so afraid to be left alone in the hospital. I assure him that he has more family coming tomorrow — that he won’t be alone for long.

He seems contented by that. Just as I turn to leave, he catches my eye.

“You know,” he tells me, “I remember being in a train station. There was this black girl working as the conductor — can you believe it? A black girl? I never heard of such a thing. John C. was there with your mother. It’s the damndest thing, but I don’t know how I got here from that train station. Do you know?”

His eyes are big with fright and wonder. I shake my head.

“I wish I knew how I got here,” he says. “Tell your mother to bring me my jacket and my shoes — I need to go home. They probably won’t let me leave, though. No, sir. They won’t let you out of prison unless the judge says it’s okay. But maybe if I tell them it’s only for a few hours … maybe if I say I’m just going to get dinner …”

I turn and leave, wondering if this will be the last time that I see him. Hoping that it is.

My grandfather is still in the hospital, and any hope for recovery has become fleeting. Dementia has set in, and he believes that rather than being treated in a Maryland hospital, he is stuck in Buffalo, NY jail. “If they find a body,” he told my mother, “they might try to pin the murder on me.”

Yesterday, he attempted to pull out his IV and catheter and refused to have an MRI done even after he signed his consent. He keeps saying that he’ll go home just as soon as he finds his shoes and asks everyone for a dime so he can call his wife, my dead grandmother, who he’s sure is worried about him. Any hostility I had towards the man is now gone. At this stage, he is just a very frightened, very sick old man in a situation he does not understand. It is difficult to hold any of his past actions against him, when you consider the present.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to make it up to see him. My boss is away on a business trip, and I have a newsletter going to press, so I have to be here to take care of it. I’m certain this continues to sap whatever good karma I have left, as well as makes my grandfather’s friends think I’m a terrible person, but such is life.

My mom is taking her new position as next of kin for a man she doesn’t like (and isn’t related to) in stride, although her anger towards his children is starting to boil over. My mom rarely has a bad thing to say about anyone — especially my hopelessly incompetent, selfish and stupid aunt and uncle.

When my dad died, my grandfather told both his surviving children, “The good one’s dead.” I thought that was a terrible thing to say, but now I’m starting to re-evaluate that opinion.

The only person in Buffalo my mother can get on the phone is my cousin Jennifer. My Aunt Linda and Uncle Johnny are unaccounted for — Johnny won’t return my mom’s phone calls, and Linda lives with Jennifer but is apparently never at home when my mom tries to reach her. They seem relatively unconcerned about the fate of my grandfather, but are concerned about the presence of one John C., my grandfather’s only friend.

John was my dad’s carpool buddy many years ago, and after my dad’s death, he struck up a friendship with my grandfather. He seems like a good enough guy, and I think he’s genuinely concerned about my grandfather’s welfare. My aunt and uncle are convinced that he was behind a burglary two years ago that resulted in the loss of my grandfather’s prized coin collection, but I have never been convinced of John’s guilt. My grandfather keeps his entire life savings in envelopes scattered around the house — if John really wanted to rob my grandfather, he would have taken those. I do suspect that he wants a cut of my grandfather’s estate, such as it is, for his efforts — and to be honest, I don’t really want to begrudge the guy that. He has taken care of him. It’s more than I can say of myself, or my aunt and uncle can say of themselves. John was there for my grandfather, we weren’t.

My cousin passed a message from my aunt and uncle on to my mom stating that she’s to take away John’s keys to my grandfather’s house. It pisses me off enough that two people who are too cowardly to even speak to my mother directly are barking orders at her, but to think that they have the audacity to dishonor the one person who’s stood by my grandfather, when they themselves cut off contact. They, too, are concerned about my grandfather’s estate — I’m sure that they’d be more than happy to liberate his house of a few of those envelopes of cash. The way I see it, they are the real thieves, intent on picking the corpse clean. But when it comes to the unsavory aspects of participating in deciding on his health care, they’re conspicuously silent. Bloody hypocrites.

The only other person besides John and my mother who I believed is owed anything of my grandfather’s estate is my cousin Mark. Mark is in the Army Airborne, and is unfortunately on combat training maneuvers in Canada. He’s the only cousin I have who has kept in regular contact with my grandfather — visiting and writing letters. Although he and I have very little in common personally, I have an enormous amount of admiration and respect for him. His situation growing up was pretty awful — he was abandoned by his parents at age six, and raised by his teenaged sister — but he’s managed to put his life together. The Red Cross is trying to get him some leave so he can come and see our grandfather. My fingers are crossed that he’ll be able to come.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings that my aunt and uncle and a few of my other cousins may drive down to make an appearance. There’s a part of me that wants them to — to shift the burden from my mother — and there’s another part of me that’s outraged that they may come down and try to take control of the situation.

In anticipation of their arrival, my mother rescued my great grandfather’s war medals, which were pinned on him by the King of England for valorous service in the Canadian army in World War I. My relations would no doubt sell them if they got their hands on them.

I am currently preparing a monologue of Shakespearean proportions to deliver to my relatives on our next meeting. Years and years of dealing with them have come to a boil, and I’m ready to let them know what I think of them. I’m anticipating this with a mixture of excitement and dread. I’d love for them to put up a fight, but I suspect they’ll just avoid what I have to say, just like they avoid everything else. But it would be worth it to try at least.

Over Christmas, my grandfather was complaining about being tired, not wanting to get up out of bed. This is my late father’s dad — my paternal grandfather. My mom and I tried to get him to go to the hospital to get checked out, but he refused in that nasty, self-righteous way that only conservative old men who don’t trust the modern world can refuse. Suffice it to say, he was pretty insulting.

But his symptoms got worse. And although my mother doesn’t particularly like him, she decided to do something, telling him that if he didn’t get help he would die. Just a few days before, he asked his only friend — a guy my dad used to work with at the printing plant — to bring him a pistol so he could “end it.” That kind of melodrama’s not unusual for my grandfather, but when he was faced with really dying, he half-heartedly decided he didn’t want to.

Getting him to the hospital was a nightmare. First he insisted that my mom make him a cup of coffee before going — which he promptly spilled all over himself because he is no longer able to use his arms. Then he decided not to go, making my mom argue with him for another twenty minutes. Finally he relented again, and she got him to the emergency room.

After a three-hour wait that could have been avoided if they’d gone in earlier (a trauma team rushed in five accident victims right when they arrived), they began running tests. Which scared the hell out of him to say the least. At 84, he’s not been to the doctor in 25 years and adamantly refuses to take pills. So the battery of blood tests, rectal exams, catscans and EKG’s, didn’t go easily. He was abusive to the doctors and the nurses and fought every step of the way.

Medical science is like some terrible magic to him. When my dad was in intensive care dying of cancer, my grandfather couldn’t grasp the idea that he was being fed with an IV — he couldn’t get over the fact that my dad wasn’t hungry. “It’s gotta bother his stomach,” he said, “he’s gotta be starving to death.” When I explained how IV’s work, he was incredulous and abusive. “I don’t believe any of that,” he told me. He rarely believes anything anyone tells him — he thinks the entire world is lying to him.

After hours of tests (and struggles with him), they discovered he was suffering from a mid-grade stroke. A stroke that could have been much more easily treated had he come in when he first started feeling ill. Now he’s in the hospital ICU, and the prognosis is — as of this writing — uncertain.

So that’s the background. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I’m feeling … nothing about it. Maybe a bit of guilt for not feeling anything, but I certainly don’t feel any grief. My grandfather and I have not been on very good terms for ten years now. When my father died, he ordered me to drop out of college and “take care of my mother.” Which was kind of ludicrous, considering that 1) she had a lot of life insurance money coming, and 2) she had a good job, already. I refused, and he got sterner. Finally, I cussed him out and swore at him in a way that I have never sworn at another living human being. My one dream in life was to go to college and escape the world I lived in and not follow my father into a life of hard labor. I was not going to change that, regardless of what my grandfather wanted. My mom didn’t even want me to drop out — shouldn’t she have had a say in what I did? To my grandfather it was irrelevant, since my mother is a woman. In his mind, women exist to take care of men — their thoughts and opinions are otherwise meaningless.

So that started the rift between him and me, though it wasn’t the start of the bad blood. When I was four, I mysteriously “fell” and broke my arm when he and I were running up the hill together outside his house. My parents suspected I may have been pushed. When he was drunk — and that was often — he was cruel and mean-spirited. He emotionally abused my grandmother, chiseling away at her self esteem day after day. We suspected my grandma had Alzheimer’s disease for years, but he refused to get her any help. She fell down and broke her hip and the disease was discovered — she died little more than a year later. Afterwards, he boasted about how he had to care for his poor wife — when in fact he neglected her for at least nine years.

I never thought my grandfather would die — I always sort of pictured him being around, immortal, outliving me. Even at 84, he still has most of the color in his hair — once black, it’s now a dark charcoal gray. To look at him, you wouldn’t think he was older than 65. Until the stroke, he still had his wits (such as they were). But now he’s on the edge of death.

I might not feel any grief now, but I feel … lonely. Not sad, but empty. Like visiting your hometown to find all the people you used to know have moved away. My childhood is long gone by this point, but there are some parts of it yet — my mom, my grandfather. But once my grandfather is gone, it’s just my mom. And when my mom is gone it’s just me — the excitement and drama and fun and sadness and wonder of my childhood will be over. His passing away is almost like a harbinger of my mom’s death, which would be truly devastating to me.

But still no grief. Maybe it’ll come later. It would be comforting if it did.