Endings
See you when you get there?
I’m pausing paid Substack posts. I appreciated the semi-privacy for exploring personal topics. But Substack won’t let me charge less than $5 a month and that feels like a lot for what I’m able to offer here. I don’t know if I’ll post less or more now that this is free. But it’s changing, somehow.
Earlier in the month, I was planning on writing about the topic of things ending. Then L.A. caught on fire, three people I know died, and various sad and frustrating events occurred. It’s been a season of grief. The good news is I guess I’m handling it. One way I’ve been coping is through music. I made a grief playlist and leaned into my feelings, which I think helped reduce some of the hopelessness. Last night I went on my friend Jess Roth’s radio show to share some of those songs and that also felt cathartic. The recording should go up Friday if you still want to listen.
I’ve also found it healing to gather with friends and family. I went home for my Grandpa’s funeral and realized that before being my Grandpa he was a real cute lil’ guy. I knew various things about his life, but you don’t always connect certain dots until you pull out all the photos and tell stories. The storytelling aspect of grief can be a helpful way to process and celebrate what’s lost. It’s hard not to get caught up in tragic endings and the illness or stress that surround them. But death creates a vacuum where you can go back and make your own meaning.
My Grandpa was an alcoholic. He was sober for most of my life, but by that point he’d raised my mom and her siblings under significant stress and gotten divorced. The alcoholism isn’t a minor aspect of his life, but he was obviously much more than that. I don’t love terms like “alcoholic” because people are more multidimensional than any labels. I also think terminology around addiction puts too much emphasis on the substances rather than the systemic factors that have a person reaching for them in the first place. My Grandpa grew up poor. His dad died before he was born. He was a veteran. He experienced various traumas.
He was also an inquisitive, intelligent, weird guy. He loved watching the news and reading National Geographic. He’d tell you at extended length about what he’d learned. A couple years into the pandemic he heard someone mention Covid. He turned to my mom and said, “Covid? You know that’s a VERY deadly disease.” This was the kooky old grandpa I came to know. But before the dementia he was very capable and active.
He and his brother built their own houses together with the help of a small paperback book called “How to Build a House.” Grandpa helped his brother build his house first because he knew they’d do a better job on the second house after some experience. Grandpa could fix or build just about anything in his basement workshop. He was an engineer at GE, often biking miles back and forth to work.
Grandpa knew how to scuba dive way back in the 50’s before a lot of the current technology existed. Sometimes he’d salvage wreckage or help the Coast Guard look for bodies. One time he and his brother were filling up scuba tanks while working on a car in the garage. It was only later he realized they’d accidentally filled the tanks with car exhaust and thankfully emptied them before they accidentally killed themselves. His “funny stories” were often a little dark. I loved that about them.
Grandpa had tattoos on his forearms from when he was in the army. He once told me, “I prolly shouldn’t have gotten those.” I thought he was crazy to say that because the tattoos seemed like the coolest thing any of my grandparents ever did. It might’ve influenced my later decision to get tattoos on my forearms. One of my tattoos is of a squid, inspired by an experience I had seeing a school of squid while scuba diving.
I don’t really connect my love of scuba diving with my Grandpa because my father-in-law is the one who got me into it. But among various mementos last week, there was an old article from the GE company newspaper about my Grandpa diving. They asked about his most unusual experiences down there and he noted the time he saw green blobs of light out in the water that were probably a school of squid. It’s strange that we both had these weird, almost spiritual experiences with squid, and that mine led to a tattoo not unlike my Grandpa’s nautical tattoos.
During my encounter with squid, I felt very aware of how alien they were. But I related to them somehow in their alienness as they watched me. They constantly changed colors, being seen, not for what they were, so much as a reflection of their environment. I wonder if that’s how Grandpa felt, with his never-to-be-diagnosed neurodivergence, trying to make himself into a soldier or an employee, a highly perceptive person who wasn’t supposed to reflect back all he saw, especially not the things seared deeply in his memories.
In retirement, Grandpa took early morning walks, hoping to see the green flash on the horizon just before the sun rose. During these walks he’d nosily look in people’s yards, investigate new construction projects, sometimes even checking my parent’s water meter levels. One time he went in someone’s driveway to pick up a piece of trash and someone reported him to the police as a suspicious person. The cops flagged down my Nana asking if she’d seen a man carrying binoculars and looking in people’s houses. She told them he was harmless. They said she seemed to know a lot about this man. She said, “well I should. I was married to him for 26 years.”
A lot of Grandpa’s best stories involve failures. There was the time he accidentally broke an ashtray. After that, whenever he got mad at his kids for doing something wrong, they’d say “well you broke the ashtray.” One time the family watched a nearby hotel burn to the ground. My mom said it looked like the chimney was gonna fall over. Grandpa said it was impossible, based on his experience of fires. “Chimney’s never fall down.” Of course then the chimney fell over and Grandpa was quoted on that for the rest of his life. Grandpa often took the family camping in a trailer. One time he was unloading waste into the campground septic tank and didn’t have the hose screwed on right. He accidentally spewed sewage all over the place. People in the surrounding camps were “wicked pissed” because it smelled horrible. He had to dig a hole to bury it all. He’d laugh telling me about it.
Grandpa had a lot of crazy stories. Some told, some not. But he seemed to enjoy telling some of the more gross and stressful ones. I think in doing so, he transmuted them into something much funnier and more joyful. And maybe that’s all you can really do. Some people would say I shouldn’t share his struggles here publicly, but secrecy is kind of a hallmark of alcoholism, and many in recovery adhere to the adage that “you’re only as sick as your secrets.” I also think maybe it would make him laugh to know I was putting this here.
I wouldn’t be here without my Grandpa and maybe not even without his alcoholism, which inspired my mom to make an extra stop on the way home on the night she met my dad. So, thanks for all of it, Grandpa. Maybe someday we’ll all meet up back on our home planet and we won’t be the weird, overly-inquisitive ones. Or maybe we’ll all be glowing blobs floating through space. Either way, I look forward to having you explain some of it to me.
