On My Grandfather

I wish I could tell you my first memory of my grandfather, but I cannot, because he was simply always there. Going to the hospital to meet my siblings for the first time; sledding downhill on to a frozen lake; learning to ice skate; learning to drive. He was exceptionally present, and now, suddenly, gone.

People lament the stupidity of the young who believe they’ll live forever, but my foolishness has been the part of me that felt as though my grandfather might never die. He was, despite his advancing age, full of life and vigor. He exercised daily. He maintained acres of property from atop a riding lawnmower with apparent ease. He still drove the car and the boat and learned the basic functions of an iPad to check the weather in the cities where his grandchildren lived. Even after I moved away, the passage of time wrought little change on Grandpa. He was sturdy as ever each time I returned — bald, gap-toothed, grinning. And because he died by accident, my last memory of my grandfather will always be of him at his steady best.

Grandpa was the youngest of six Minnesota farm kids, born in Steele County at the outset of the Depression in 1930. Marking his place in the lineup, his parents called him Junior Milton, and it wasn’t until he moved to Minneapolis at nearly thirty that he started to introduce himself as Jay. Even in their eighties, my grandfather’s last surviving brother Earl called him “Little Brother” when they were together. The two of them spoke as many as three times each day.

He was profoundly modest, my grandfather, and guided by an abiding faith in God. If you woke up early enough at Eagle Lake, you’d find him reading the Bible each morning before his daily push-ups. Humility and hard work defined him — he worked as union bricklayer for forty years — but there was a certain American folklore mythology to him too. My favorite story of Grandpa as a younger man involved he and my uncle Earl driving their own mother’s casket over 500 miles between Lamar, Missouri and southern Minnesota in the back of a station wagon after a blizzard.

Faith was my grandfather’s mooring, but my stubborn, hilarious Grandma was his light. They were married sixty-one years, the bricklayer and the ER nurse, and the house they tended on Eagle Lake in retirement was like his decades-long love song to her; a sanctuary for our family, a refuge for assorted wildlife rescued by the DNR that they cared for together.

My grandfather made everyone he met feel important. Friendly though he was, I never heard him speak of himself unless prompted. He listened intently, and he loved all of us fiercely. I can still smell the Old Spice and feel the crinkle of his windbreaker as I hugged him for the last time.

There are a million things I wish to write about my grandfather, recollections I want to capture, to cling to, to smell and never lose. It feels impossible to say goodbye to a man so solid; I want to keep talking of him to give him renewed form. As my family has come together in the last several days, I am finding that our Grandpa is in everything. In the brick face he laid in the fireplace at my parents’ house; in my mother’s strong hands; in my sister’s humor. Without fanfare, my grandfather built a life, a family, a community. Even in his absence, my family is shaped by him, grounded by his quiet love.

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