My Grandfather, The Truth, and Me
A long essay on trying to know someone else—and also yourself
I.
Good morning.
Last August, my grandfather died. He was 97 years old. My grandmother is 96 and I’m lucky enough to still have her in my life. She subscribes to this Substack and often sends me notes on what I write. So, I am writing this with some fear—because I need to write about my grandfather and my relationship to the truth and I am afraid of what she might say or what she might think.
I need to write about my grandfather because he was one of the most important people in my life and I had about 30 years as a fully conscious person to appreciate him. I was able to see my grandfather through a child’s eyes, a teenager’s eyes, a young adult’s eyes, and through the eyes of a man approaching middle age. With each of those perspectives came a different way of seeing him and so I never really had one true view of who he was as a person.
We don’t ever have one true view of any individual, I suppose. It’s my belief that we never truly know anyone, no matter how close we are to them. How could we possibly? There’s no way to ever know the depths of what someone feels, of how they see the world, of all the things they want and desire. That’s because as individuals we can hardly fathom those things for ourselves and spend our lives attempting to understand what we actually want and desire in this life. So how could another person come close to comprehending those things?
At my most whimsical, optimistic, and pretentious moments, I think of this James Joyce quote from the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses. “What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.” Our souls are ageless and mutable and full of complexity, which makes us hard to fully know.
But at my most practical and pessimistic (and still pretentious) moments, I think of this passage from the end of “Great Falls,” the short story by Richard Ford. “[I]t is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.” We are, in so many ways, simply animals who meet each other on the road and there’s no chance of ever getting beyond that fact.
My grandfather meant the world to me. But I don’t think I ever really knew him. I knew things about him. I listened to his stories and his advice earnestly. I loved the way he called me, “my boy.” And yet I constantly find myself trying to remember basic facts about him and his life. I only knew him in one phase of his life: the one in which his family was grown and he entered a period of semi-retirement followed by a long period of retirement. So I don’t know if I could even say what the truth about my grandfather is, but only what feels true to me.
And, in ways that are both problematic but axiomatic, what feels true is often more important than what is actually true.
II.
Over the last decade or so, before he died in August, my grandfather had a series of ailments. I honestly couldn’t even start to list them in any accurate way. He had a constant routine of doctor’s appointments to go to and medications to take and he relayed that routine to me in various ways when I saw him at holidays or other family gatherings. It all made sense to me: what else can you expect when you live into your nineties?
Despite his ailments, my grandfather was active and present for his advanced age. This was a man who owned two iPads, still handled tasks for the homeowner’s association of his over-55 community, and was a very social person.
That is until the past few years when his health started to wane. It wasn’t anything major but the war of attrition that is advanced age of that degree had begun to take its toll. Although some of it was self-inflicted.
One day my grandfather received a grocery delivery. He had ordered a case of apples from Costco. He had mistaken the amount of apples he had ordered and thought two apples were missing. In trying to find the missing apples, he accidentally spilled the case down his staircase. In trying to retrieve them, his chairlift pinned his knee against the wall, injuring his leg badly. The missing apples were never found.
Another incident was his insistence on trying to back his car out of his driveway after he’d been told to stop driving due to his vision becoming too impaired. He misjudged what pedal he was on and backed his car into a tree, again causing him undue injury.
Those cases paired with his other ailments began to slow him down. It wasn’t completely noticeable in the moment, but looking back on pictures from the past few years I can see it more clearly.
Yet it wasn’t until this spring that he took a turn for the worse. The cause was something called COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). I’d never heard of it before, but, according to the CDC, 16 million people in the United States suffer from COPD.
One of the causes of COPD is tobacco use. My grandfather had been a smoker but, as was told to me, he’d stopped smoking in his late forties or early fifties. And, as far as I knew, hadn’t had any issues related to his smoking.
Because of this, my grandfather had to be taken to a medical rehabilitation center where he stayed for most of the summer. I relied on my father and my aunt, my father’s youngest sister, for most of the information about my grandfather. He had some days where he was very sick and couldn’t really communicate and it wasn’t a good idea to call him on those days. But when I was given the OK, I’d call him at his rehabilitation center.
Through the summer, I was able to talk to him on the phone about once a week, usually for about seven to ten minutes before he’d get tired or want to get off the phone. Honestly, that’s how long most of my phone calls were with him before he was sick with COPD. We never really needed to talk more than that. I think he simply liked hearing my voice on the phone, knowing that I cared enough about him to call, and then greeting me, the way he always did, by saying, “Hello, my boy!” Anything after that was somewhat irrelevant.
III.
One of the last things my grandfather said to me was, “If I can work the program and beat this thing, that’s the only way. And then I can get out of here—and go home.” He said that to me on the phone, lying in his bed in the medical rehabilitation on Long Island. When he said that to me, I was sitting on the screened in porch in 100 degree heat at my fiance’s parents house in Austin.
The words stuck in my head after he said them, so I wrote them down on my Notes app. Later that day, I recorded myself saying them, in an attempt to imitate him. I don’t know why I felt the need to do that. I think it was because the determination and focus I heard in his voice struck me as something precious and not to be taken lightly. I wanted to document that somehow.
However, I’m not exactly sure that’s what he said to me on the phone. I jotted it down after the call, but that was already a minute or two after he’d said the words and my head was filled with concern. Even at that moment, I may have already changed the phrasing and mixed up the facts with what I could remember.
And now, I’ve made it a story, a kind of truth that I can tell myself and other people. That’s why I was never suited to be a journalist. The truth matters less to me than what feels true.
When I say the “truth,” I mean objective facts. I understand those are important. Believe me, now more than ever, objective facts are more important than what feels true to people. The internet has made it too easy to distort facts into things that resemble truths or seem true based on something a person feels or believes.
What I’m talking about doesn’t have to do with war or politics. What I mean is that in my life, among the people I interact with and the works of art or culture I read, watch, or listen to, I value what feels true. I don’t care if it is the actual truth. I don’t care what the lyrics of a song say or what it is about, I care that it feels true to itself and to me. I care that the people in my life act in a way that is true to who they are instead of how the facts of a situation dictate who they should be.
I detest anything that doesn’t feel true. When I’m less than gracious with people, which is most of the time, I hold them to that standard—of doing and representing something that feels true. And whenever I haven’t seen it—in friends, family, people I’ve loved, and works of art—I turn away. That’s what makes me something of a snob and someone who is hard to know or be close to. Because how can anybody do something that feels true all the time when understanding what is true in the first place is nearly impossible? Since so many things can be or feel true at the same time.
IV.
Here are some things about me that are, I think, true:
I am a good friend
I have no idea what I am doing at work
I am a giving and attentive partner who listens
I am a coward
I am a writer
I am an ungrateful son
I am patient and warm
I am an absentee friend
I am good leader
I am not a good writer because I have written three novels that remain unpublished and have not published a short story since 2012.
I am a good manager and a skilled employee
I am a selfish, distracted, and non-present partner
I am a good son
I am judgemental and cold
Here are some things about my grandfather that are, I think, true:
He was the best grandfather you could ask for
He was an alcoholic
He was a savvy operator at work
He stopped drinking in his 80s after falling down on a boat
He was a hail-fellow-well-met
He was a demanding person to work for
He taught me how to catch crabs off a dock
He stopped drinking, pretty much cold turkey
He taught me how to be an operator at work and how to constantly learn from and adjust your processes
He had a nasty temper
He loved me as much as he could love another person
He taught me that, when you are unlucky catching crabs off a dock, you can buy them at a store, put them in a bucket, and then tell people that you caught crabs.
All of those things about us are both true—or were true—to some degree at any given time. My grandfather was multiple people in his long life. I saw one of the many people he was from a very particular vantage point. I didn’t know the entirety of him as a person.
I knew him as Grandpa, a kind and giving presence in my life who slowly developed more layers as I grew older and could start to understand the arc and depth of his life as a person in the world better than I could as a child.
When I was in my early twenties and just starting to figure out the difference between what I was good at and what I was passionate about, he explained his approach to operations to me. “First you implement,” he said. “Then you observe, then you adjust. And it repeats like that.”
I’ve used that approach as something of a mantra in my career. The thing is, I don’t know if he even said it that way or if I just remember it that way. I know he said something like that, but maybe those words are the words I needed to hear at that time or, when I needed them at work, I heard what I needed to hear. It’s become another story I can tell myself and it’s a story that feels true.
A story my grandfather used to tell me frequently was how he came to work at his final job. He was retired and had gone out fishing for blue fish one day. However, his boat engine wouldn’t restart. He had to be towed back into shore. When his boat was inspected he had a summons because he didn’t have the most up to date emergency flares for his boat. He was also in his bathing suit so he didn’t have his boat registration, so he got a summons for that as well. When he went to court and had to wait to pay the county clerk for his summons he started a conversation with a woman who was there. In the course of that conversation, she hired my grandfather as a consultant for her company.
He worked for her for a fairly brief period of time and then she died. My grandfather was asked to take over the company. He did and once he did, he realized that the company was in a huge amount of debt. My grandfather was able to bring discipline to the business so that it was profitable and from there he asked my father to take it over from him. My father did, which brought us back to Long Island from outside Philadelphia, and he then expanded the business and eventually sold it.
My grandfather’s stalled boat engine completely changed the trajectory of my life and my family’s life. I can say with a great deal of certainty that my life would most likely not be as rich with lifelong friends and memories if we had not moved to Long Island.
The last time I saw my grandfather, he told me that story. I recorded it on my phone without telling him. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him I was recording it. For some reason I was embarrassed. But I wanted to have it, so I wouldn’t forget it. I believe every part of that story, but who knows how much of it was rounded into a shape of his making over the course of time.
Like my grandfather, I am and have been many people in my life. I try to reconcile that fact every day. I try to remind myself of the good parts of my character and the things I have achieved. Though it is hard for me, I make an effort to celebrate those when I can. And I move forward each day trying to come to terms with the fact that there is no one true version of me—there are only the multiple parts and versions and all of them feel true.
V.
The day of my grandfather’s funeral was typical of August on Long Island. It was warm, humid, and cloudy with the faint glimmer and promise of sun, just enough so that you might imagine going to the beach in the later part of the afternoon.
At the funeral home in Moriches people from all parts of my extended family gathered as well as friends and acquaintances my grandparents had made over the years. It was sad and people cried like they do at all funerals. I cried several times.
But what steeled me eventually was looking at the photo collages and books that had been put together. I looked over my grandfather’s life as it was assembled in selected photos. He lived for 97 years and I saw the different hues of his soul, of who he was as a person, of what was true about him, in those images. There were pictures of him as a middle aged man at work, as a newlywed, as a beloved uncle, as a serious father of four, as a doting grandfather of eight, as a beaming first-time parent.
I saw so many pictures from family parties—ones before my time that I’d heard regaled by relatives and ones I could remember. This was as full and complete a life as any of us could hope for. There was no reason to be sad.
Later at the cemetery, as we walked to the gravesite, it felt like being in a national park or a large rain forest. The trees were huge, the air was thick and damp, everything seemed larger than life.
At the gravesite, navy men were there in bright white uniforms. My grandfather had been in the Merchant Marine and the Navy. I looked closely at the navy men and saw slight stains on their shirt sleeves and pant legs. Some of the stains appeared to be from sweat but others may have been from dirt.
The navy men folded the American flag with crisp, unnaturally slow movements. Once the flag was folded, they presented it to my grandmother. She placed the flag on her small lap. I could see she was crying behind her large sunglasses.
We said goodbye to my grandfather then. Young girls, his great granddaughters, put flowers on his casket. This was a full life.
VI.
During our final phone conversation, my grandfather said the following to me: “When your father and I are determined to do something, we do it. I think that’s maybe a Domino trait. You can be like that too sometimes—when you focus.”
Again, I’m not sure if that is what he actually said to me. It’s what I remember him saying and I know I’ve changed some words in my head already. But that’s what I feel to be true, that’s the story I have now.
In the moment, his comment stung, but I took it as a piece of feedback from a person I loved and respected who was moving closer toward death. Later, though, I realized that it probably wasn’t true. The part about me at least.
Like anyone, I can be distracted, but something I feel to be true about myself is that I am determined and focused. Perhaps sometimes too much to my own detriment and in such a way that can shut people out. Anyone that works with me knows that when I set out to make something happen, it pretty much happens.
I don’t fault my grandfather for saying that to me. How could I? He knew me and loved me as much as he possibly could. But he didn’t really know me just as I didn’t know him. No matter how much I loved him, no matter how much I listened to him, no matter how much I cried the night I found out he had passed away, I couldn’t possibly ever know him.
He was a person in this world. There was too much to know. He lived for 97 years and I only could truly perceive him as a person for maybe 30 of the 38 years I’ve been alive. That’s barely enough time to start to understand a life that long and full and complicated.
I’ll never know the truth about my grandfather and who he was. I’ll only have the stories I know and feel to be true. I think, for most of us, that’s all we ever really have. What we do with those stories, how we hold them and use them, is ours to decide. And that makes all the difference.
❤️❤️
When my grandfather died in 2016, I was in college. The poems I wrote in those early days of grief ended up becoming my thesis, but I still haven’t quite worked out my relationship with my grandfather. But reading this--and thinking of him as someone different to me at different stages in life--has helped. Thanks (as always) for sharing.