As I sit here writing this, my grandfather is dying in Atlanta.
We are all dying, all the time. In some people, it is just more urgent and immidiate than others. In his case, it sounds fiarly urgent.
Heart failure, bladder infection, DNR, and ICU are little dots that highlight the urgency – like that sheen of white Bob Ross would always throw on his spruce to make them stand out in contrast to the other happy trees.
I bitch a lot, and make a lot of noise about the stupidity I waddle through day to day – it is actually really rare that I genuinely hate someone. I dislike people here and there, but hatred is not something I sprinkle casually through my life. It is toxic – hatred always rebounds back at those who keep it.
To say I hate my grandfather doesn’t fully do the situation justice. I’ve been waiting more than twenty years for this.
Now that he is going, that hatred is turning back at me. Hating a genetic predecessor, in a way, is hating part of who you are. Tricky business.
I hope he doesn’t linger.
The sad part of all this is that I don’t expect my grandmother to survive him long. They have been together more than sixty years. I don’t think she’ll want to keep going, much less know how to.
