1990 or so...

I had written this trite-ass bullshit yesterday about this Sikh in a silver Sunfire I keep passing on the highway every day on my way to work, but I'm not in the mood.

Crib notes: Arab guy, look at the beard, wonder if he has more than one burgundy turban, do they make those in breathable fabrics if he's mowing his lawn on a hot summer's day?

I also had a whole dissertation on when political correctness actually doesn't help. I'm thinking specifically of when we lost sight of classifying transients as such things as "winos" and "hobos," and just started calling them "homeless." Now the drifter with the shiv is in the same category as the sad sack with the bulging kerchief-on-a-stick who hops a train to the Great Plains. That just gives hobos everywhere a black eye.

Not today.

I've been fortunate in this life of mine that - so far - I haven't really been faced with an unnaturally early death in my sphere. I remember a visit to my grandfathers in probably 1990, both on their death beds, but they were old men and suffering long illnesses.

We were in town when one died.

In the two days prior, we had visited him at the hospital. I was probably fifteen, and there was little that could penetrate my wall of sarcastic bitterness.

Except this.

My grandfather was the town's electrician in a small fading mining hamlet in the westernmost part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm not sure the town ever could have been called "thriving," but a few decades of immigrant folk had made it their home, and those who were unmotivated enough to leave lived out their years with shit jobs and little hope.

He had cancer. We were a thousand miles away while it began to eat away at the burly little man who had taken his grandkids to the trout farm, baited their hooks, and cheered us on as we pulled fish after fish out of the pond. By the time we got to his side, he was in his last days.

It wasn't a hospital, exactly. But it wasn't not a hospital. It was one of those places where people go to die, or because they can't help them adequately in a real health care facility. I remember it was buried in the woods, well off the highway. Then again, everything up there was buried in the woods, but the building seemed to loom treacherously on its foundation, pushing against the onslaught of trees that threatened to envelop it whole.

I sniffed away the Stephen King imagery in front of me and followed my mom inside.

It was surprisingly dark inside, some sort of acknowledgement that these people were so dying they may as well be dead already, so why burn a hundred watts when twenty will do? The walls were tiled in spots and plastered in others, but uniformly aqua-blue from floor to ceiling. Everything was that color, and didn't have the sheen of a well-maintained building. The single color scheme left you feeling like you were staring into a tunnel, the depths of which weren't illuminated enough to insure your path.


It felt like you were in the belly of death. And smelled like it too. Equal parts antiseptic, medicated balm, and urine was an assault on the senses compared to the clean forest air outside.

So this is how people die?

We went up a couple flights of stairs and continued to tunnel our way through the halls to find my grandfather's room. As we approached our destination, the voice grew louder. "Hello! Hello! Hello!" It was a plaintive cry, either dementia or demanding attention she was not receiving. "Hello!" It was persistently sad, and choked the atmosphere of quiet resignation from my ears. I didn't - I couldn't ask who this woman was, or why she only and always said "Hello," screamed "Hello," and wailed "Hello."

So this is how people die?

My grandfather was in an aqua-marine room, in an aqua-marine bed, cramped into a bent frame position with eyes and mouth glazed wide open. His arms and hands didn't lay peacefully at his side, they were bent crookedly above his body in some sort of mindless half grasp. He was in some sort of waking coma, where I guess he had been for more than a week.

He used to pack probably 240 on his 5'7" frame. I remember my aunt saying he weighed 65 pounds now.

There was no recognition when we touched him, when we talked to him, when my aunts stroked his hair and moistened his open mouth with a sponge. He didn't so much as twitch or growl.

I think we were in the room for maybe half an hour. Maybe. My mom was smart enough to get her kids out of there before we felt the need to chase the sorrow with a fifth of scotch.

I went to sleep uneasy that night, in the bed in which my grandfather had slept, under the roof in which he helped raise seven children over forty years. I remember sleeping in fits like I usually do, fifteen minutes asleep then fifteen seconds awake, lather, rinse, repeat. Then, around 2AM, I woke up with a jolt and sat straight up in bed. It was in the next instant that my eyes became heavier than they had been all night and I slept with vigor, strong and peaceful.

Over cinnamon toast and juice my mom told me the next morning my grandfather had died. "Around 2AM?" I asked. She blinked and turned her head sideways.

"How did you know?"

My grandfather, having served in "The Big One," was entitled to a military burial. I was a fledgling trumpeter, and my mom asked me if I wanted to play "Taps" on the bugle for her father. I could tell by the sorrow in her eyes that this would be a sort of full-circle honor that she would hold close forever, and I agreed.

It was unseasonably blustery for early May, and I wasn't dressed for it. The funeral was mercifully short, and officiated by an Episcopalian Minister. The Catholic Priest, from the house in which my grandparents worshipped for decades, from the house that had baptized seven of their children, from the house in which more than half of those children were married, and from the house in which a half dozen grandchildren had been baptized, refused to so much as visit my grandfather in the hospital. In the eighteen months of declining health, my grandfather had gone from sickly to invalid to comatose. In those months, money was scarce and primary care was the only direction in which their funds were depleting.

Not to the coffers of St. Asshole's. Most of my family on that side has not been able to embrace the Catholic Church - or in some cases, God - since.

I wouldn't get near the coffin. Didn't want to see a taxodermic impression of the emaciated shell of my grandfather. I wanted to remember the buzz cut and horn rimmed smile behind quiet eyes pulling a trout from my fish hook and telling me he's never caught a bigger one here before. I wanted to remember the barrel chest in the ubiquitous blue pocket tee clicking between three channels silently begging for some peace and quiet in the midst of a dozen hyper grandchildren.

The closure to me had happened standing over that "hospital" bed. He was gone already, he wasn't going to snap out of it and show me how to whittle. He wasn't going to roll out of bed and have me help him down in the workshop. He was gone.

I hadn't packed for this weather. It was a steady, nearly-freezing rain. It wasn't supposed to be this cold. I grabbed the trumpet one of the VFW guys had lent me, and climbed into the car for the caravan to the cemetery. I had the mouthpiece between my palms, alternating rubbing it between my hands to warm it up and buzzing into it to make sure I could keep my lips moving in this weather.

I unpacked the trumpet when we arrived, and stood there like a good soldier off to the side of what few Lodge or VFW buddies could come out to honor my granddad. Three uniformed Guardsmen were well behind the Minister, and the family was packed together for comfort and warmth on the other side of the plot. I had the mouthpiece clenched in my left hand, the trumpet valves idly keeping my fingers busy on my right.

It was cold. I had no umbrella, and was getting assaulted by this almost-sleet. The Minister finally gave me the signal, and I put the trumpet together and raised it to my lips. Out of the corner of my eye, in what was a total surprise to me, I saw some high school kid with a bugle duck down out of sight, obscured behind a simple but massive crypt.

I was cold, and I hadn't warmed up. Figuratively, literally, it doesn't matter. The rain was beating the shit out of me, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I buzzed into the horn, and the first crackling sounds of "Taps" escaped from the bell. I played it slowly, mournfully, as I had practiced it. Behind the crypt I saw the high school kid raise his bugle up, and he matched my little soldier uncertainty with an echo. Three shots from the Guardsmen. I started into the second stanza and saw my mom, my aunts, watching me and crying. I couldn't and wouldn't hold the tears back. The rain had beaten my will down past the point of resistance. Another echo, more shots and the mechanistic clacking of rounds being reloaded. A tear choked third stanza, and I struggled to hit the high note. This time the echo wasn't behind the melody, but meshed together with my broken tones in solidarity, in support. More shots, and again. I saw my extended family across the coffin, grandmother holding a flag, she couldn't bring her eyes up from the grass. Aunts, uncles, restless freezing cousins. Most eyes on me, and I had only one more stanza to cough up.

It made it through the end of the bell, each Guardsman had taken his seventh shot, and some nameless high school kid took the opportunity to slink away, still under cover of the burial markers behind which he had hidden.

It was cold. I was cold. I stood where I had stood, where I had played, next to the old soldiers without benefit of umbrella or tent as the coffin was lowered into the ground. I shook off my mother's subtle urging to come in under the umbrella, come over with the family. I shook off my mother's urging because in that moment I stood next to the old soldiers, quietly crying next to stoic old men who had seen far worse I'd imagine than the ravages of cancer. I was a soldier for that moment. I had looked upon death for the first time, and I had played the plaintive song of tribute in its face. I was a little soldier, tears mixed with icy rain, still standing firm with idle fingers working trumpet valves to keep warm.

Between the dogs of war and the fruits of his labors, I chose to ally with the former. The old men who couldn't cry anymore, wouldn't bother crying anymore. These men handled death with a scowl and a cigarette. These were the men who could accept what they had seen at face value, they were strong, they wouldn't cry.

They didn't. I did.

I wanted to be the rigid little soldier, pick off a clean melody when it came time, and use that wall behind which I was stashing my emotions to lean into the storm. I wanted to be a rock, I wanted not to mourn. It didn't work out that way.

I walked back to the procession not with the grizzled veterans but with my weather-beaten family. I had the trumpet under my arms, hands buried deep in my pockets for warmth, hoping I wouldn't soak clean through the only pair of shoes I had brought with me to the Great White North.

I had my eyes to the ground, hoping no one else could see the difference between tears of sorrow and the rain that rinsed them clean from my face.

It was cold. I was cold. But unlike my grandfather today, I could choose to fall into the arms of my family, and there I would find the warmth I so badly needed.