Papa

Papa is a title used for both fathers and grandfathers, although I’ve only ever come across it being used to refer to a father in a few books that I’ve read. For me, it refers to my paternal grandfather, someone I’ve known since the day I came into the world. And who died recently. Nine days ago, to be exact.

His death wasn’t all that a shock. For years, his heart health had proved to be a problem, necessitating numerous open heart surgeries, until he had nineteen stents in his heart. According to the hospital, it was a record. But it was also what kept him alive for most of my life, my twenty-two years.

There are major differences between the way I’ve experienced and dealing his death and my other grandparents’ death. For one thing, I got to see him about a week before he died, when we traveled up to our hometown to visit with him. He was still all there mentally, able to carry on conversations about D.C., sports and life in general. It was his physical health he needed help with, being confined to a wheelchair and needing help to get into bed. I came to the realization that it was probably the last time I was going to see him, and knowing that created some kind of comfort. That I had gotten to say goodbye, instead of being hundreds of miles away like I had been for the other times.

Another difference is that I was with my family. My brother and I live in the same city, close to each other, so when he first told me that Papa was entering hospice care, I was there in person with him. I started crying, but I wasn’t alone. I had somebody to lean on, to mourn with me, to be there for me.

Still, when Mom called me to tell me that he had passed away, I started crying. I felt like this was really it, with him being my last grandparent. Adult life was already not fun in many ways, and this only added to it.

It was his calling hours that changed my perspective. The wake was scheduled to start at 5, but people started coming fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to start. So they came. And kept coming. For a good two hours. All different kinds of people, from the church he had attended, from political organizations he was involved in, and even old Xerox coworkers. At the end of the night, I flipped through the registry to see how many people had signed in. I counted 80 parties. Sure some of them were from Mom’s side of the family, but that didn’t even total the amount of people that had come since couples had signed in together. It had to equal more than a hundred people. People he had had an impact on by getting involved and not stopping, even after Nana (his wife, my grandmother) had passed away eight years before. He didn’t stop getting involved. I knew that meant that I needed to also, as he had always encouraged me to get out of the house in any ways I could. I had done that in college and had tried my best in the “real world” in the year since I had graduated college.

The day of his funeral, we went to the cemetery in the morning and then to his house in the afternoon. It technically still was “his” house, even though he wasn’t alive anymore. I remembered that he had started writing a story, the story about how him and Nana had met as young adults in Washington, D.C. I found it on his computer by searching his files, knowing that he had wanted me to have it.

Since I lived there now, I felt a connection to the setting as I read the story, finding that the writing was actually pretty good. So I might do something with it. Maybe I can write a book. I’m not exactly sure what kind of book. Maybe a true life novel, a story that contains a combination of real life characters and events but also has some fictional elements to it. I’ve always wanted to write a book, so why can’t this be the start of something? Papa would have wanted me to do something. So I will.