Grandpa
Art by Cassie J. Sneider.
By Cassie J. Sneider
My grandpa died, and after I delivered the eulogy, I went to see a ska show in the city. I don’t remember who the band was, but I do remember that my last words about my grandpa were folded in my pocket, wrung from nervousness like a washcloth, and they remained there because my boyfriend did not ask me about the funeral or what I had said. This kind of insensitivity from Keith was no surprise, considering he had answered the landline in his bedroom while we were losing our respective virginities to each other, and then cut our lovemaking short so he could pick up his friend Grant and drink a stolen six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in the garage. Keith had said that he loved me, but he had also said he was disappointed that my vagina didn’t look like the ones they showed in porn, tight and hairless like a cloven hoof, so I wasn’t so sure if he really meant it. One thing he did love was ska music, and he talked about the horn section of the band we were about to see while I sweated through the eulogy in my pocket.
At my grandmother’s funeral the year before, I had choked. My mother stood up when it was near the end and announced to our relatives that I had something to say. I looked around the room and saw some of my cousins crying, some looking at each other or watching the clock on the wall hoping for a swifter ending. Then I saw my grandfather crying, and I couldn’t do anything but cry with him. My mom was still standing up, looking at us sobbing hard and loud, and my grandfather waved his hand to dismiss me from my responsibility of first-time eulogist. Shortly thereafter, everyone filed outside to the parking lot to smoke cigarettes. My weird bachelor uncles disappeared into their cars, rusted heaps from the 70s which always looked like they should be rolling over a cliff in a Saturday afternoon movie. The rest of us went back to my aunt’s house for Entenmann’s funeral cake.
I couldn’t choke for Grandpa, though. When he was dying but I knew he could still hear me, the last thing I said to him was that I was going to make sure people remembered him someday. I was angry at my cousins for never taking the time to get to know him, listening to his stories while he ashed into a Chock Full O’ Nuts can outside of the tiny Section 8 apartment he shared with my grandmother. I was mad at them for treating him like any crazy old man we didn’t know who used a rope for a belt and hadn’t worked since 1975 just because he didn’t feel like it. I was mad at myself for not knowing more about him, though I had asked him the most questions out of anyone. When my grandparents moved into a nursing home, I became the keeper of the family photos, the scratched 45s in a longbox, a jar of pennies, a boy scout ring, and a few broken pocket watches. No one fought with me over who got to keep these things, and the rest of everything went to a dumpster, kelly green in the parking lot, smiling like a fireplant in a Nintendo game, eating our legacy of garbage and sucking it into a Warp World where anybody but me might care.
In the eulogy that day, I said what I knew: that Grandpa saved birthday candles and lit them outside for ant lampposts. That he smoked Camels, and built a swing set from milk crates and pipes so rusted I am surprised we all escaped childhood without tetanus. I said that Grandpa took care of my grandmother even though she was agoraphobic and deaf and paranoid and accused him of sleeping with “coloreds” when she wasn’t watching. I said that Grandpa listened to me on the radio in high school when I digitized his scratched 45s and made dedications so he could hear his name and his records. I said that I wished more people got to know him, because I did and I loved him. And then I said it, the thing I shouldn’t have said: that he was lonely in the nursing home, and I am glad I visited him because time waits for no one and we’ll all get there soon to that quiet place where you are listening to the radio hoping for something familiar to fill the silence.
It got real quiet after that. Afterward, my weird uncles got in their cars, which overheated and backfired as they drove out of the parking lot. At my aunt’s house, somebody inevitably opened an Entenmann’s crumb cake while somebody else brewed weak coffee and talked about the time that had passed since the last tragedy that brought us all together. Somebody smoked a cigarette with somebody else and somebody probably said something spooky like, “Death comes in threes, you know.”
I got on a train and saw a ska band I don’t remember and none of us said anything about what happened that day ever again.
**
My parents went to Disneyworld without me or my sister, which, even though I was twenty-one and legally old enough not to have a vested interest in family vacations, I couldn’t help but feel slighted. I was officially a buzzkill to my parents. It was like they didn’t need me all along, that those times on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and Space Mountain when I was six, they had just been waiting for me to grow up so that it could be the two of them. I was the black sheep on my own version of the cover of Out of Step, wearing an embroidered mouse hat and desperate to ride the monorail and party with the white sheep.
While my parents were away, I took in the paper and fed the dogs. I skimmed the leaves out of the pool and left a neat pile of mail on the kitchen table every day. I stayed out of my sister’s way. My friends came over at night to play Super Mario Bros. 3 in the basement and a few nights my boyfriend slept under an E.T. comforter surrounded by glow in the dark stars in my childhood bedroom. The bands I knew and the friends I had were becoming my family, but I didn’t know that then. I still wished for some cool older person in my life to tell me I was doing something right, a guidance counselor for the lonely ones who do things their own way.
My grandpa had been that person for a long time. As I got older, I found myself wishing more and more that he was around to appreciate the sort of adult I was becoming. If he were alive, I would take him for a ride in my green Hyundai Sonata with flames painted down the fenders and we’d drive to midnight kickball in the Tower Records parking lot. He probably wouldn’t play, but he could smoke cigarettes and talk to my friends until it was time to go to the diner across the street and get late night gravy fries when the game was over.
I went to the mailbox and skimmed the envelopes for my name while I walked up the driveway. There were mostly bills and circulars, but then I saw a letter from my college. Had the D in Italian or the withdrawal from European Literature caught up to me? Would my financial aide be taken away? I felt my heart seize up at the thought of working at a grocery store and living in my mom’s house forever like a Billy Joel song on a Lite FM station.
I boiled water and steamed the letter, something I had only ever fantasized about doing from a lifetime of sitcom-viewing. The envelope opened like a hot oyster shell and I pulled out the letterhead, reading with the concern of ass-saving self-preservation, which quickly melted to confusion, and then a morbid tornado of ideas.
With no savings or retirement, my grandparents had donated their bodies to science. There were no caskets or elaborate memorials for them, only quiet ceremonies in the chapel of their state-run nursing home. They each passed away in a hospital and an ambulance from the medical school came for them without so much as the fanfare of a siren. They were here, and then they were gone.
“Ma,” I had asked a few months after they had both left this life. “What happened to Grandma and Grandpa?”
My mother took a drag off a cigarette. “Whaddaya mean? They’re dead.”
“Yeah, but, like, after…”
“They bury them at sea.”
“But, like, alone? Or do they just dump them all together?”
“How the hell would I know? I guess they just throw them in the water with all the other poor people.”
It just seemed like a waste, throwing my grandparents into the ocean like that. They weren’t just ashes. They were veiny hands that showed me how to roll perfect meatballs, a hollow bird-body sitting cross-legged in a recliner, and a heart with a crush on Engelbert Humperdink. They were callused fingers wrapped around a cigarette without a filter, a silver five o’clock shadow, and ears straining to hear a battery-operated radio. They were two people who loved me, and it hurt to imagine them floating in the foam that crested the tide of the Long Island Sound, churning into the undertow and then disappearing as though they never were.
SEPTEMBER 2003
Dear MR./MRS. SNEIDER,
This letter is to inform you that the remains of MR. STEVEN DOUGLAS KASULKA are now ready for reclamation. If you wish, the University will send you his cremated remains free of charge to the address provided. If we do not hear from you by NOVEMBER 1, 2003, HIS/HER remains will be buried at sea with the rest of the medical specimens of the YEAR 2001. Kindly return this form with your decision in the postage paid envelope provided in a timely manner and we will honor your wishes.
With sincere best,
THE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY
I stared in shock at the letter. I turned the heat down on the stove and sat at the kitchen table, reading and re-reading it. Then I pulled the kitchen phone off the receiver, called my boyfriend, and read it to him.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means I can get my grandpa back.” I knotted the cord around my hand and slowly unwrapped it.
I could hear Matt eating a wet bowl of ramen on the other end of the line, considering what to say. “What would you do with him?”
“I think I would just take him everywhere. Like, cruising around. Record shopping. I’d take him to work and to shows and drive around with him until I sufficiently showed him my life. Then I’d probably bury him at sea.”
“Why don’t you let them just bury him at sea?”
I thought about it. “It’s basically a potter’s grave at sea for poor people. I feel like somebody owes him the respect of a good time before he’s totally gone from the Earth.”
I could hear Matt sucking noodles off of a fork, then the clink of a dish hitting more dishes in a sink. “Well, there’s the thing you want to do, and then there’s the right thing to do.”
Everything always seemed to boil down to that, though. When I got off the phone, I found a working pen in a junk drawer and checked off the box that felt the most right.
**
For six whole months, I raced home to check the mail. I looked behind the bushes for a package from FedEx or UPS and I was always disappointed. The mailman got to know my face and would just hand over the stacks of bills and bank statements and new credit card applications in the driveway. I planned all of my courses for the next semester around the delivery of the mail, even though there were already limited English classes at the medical school I attended. I took Russian literature and faked my way through an Indian Music Theory class. I got by on C’s. Eventually, I was so overwhelmed by how much I had failed at being a full-time commuter student with a full time job and a full time social life, I stopped caring about who got the mail. I would just be relieved that the package finally came so I could stop worrying about it.
I never told anyone about what I did. Well, that’s not true. I told Matt. I told one other boyfriend and I might have told my sister. And now I am telling you.
My grandpa is lost in the mail. He has been sitting in a post office, in ground shipment, or par avion for over ten years. My grandpa is missing in action, kicked under a table or shaded by priority mailers or one-cent stamps in a spot where nobody ever looks. He could have been insufficiently postaged, or return-to-sendered, or not-at-this-addressed. But after all these years, I would like to believe that the box broke open and a light dusting of my grandpa fell over all the other packages and letters, and he disappeared as they were sorted, and was carried to all the places he never got to see when he was alive. This is what I know in my heart: he was scattered, all that was left of him, like the cherry of a cigarette ashed into a coffee can during a story I promise you will remember.
Cassie J Sneider is the author of Fine, Fine Music. She writes and draws cartoons for the Rumpus. She is a karaoke jockey and a pug mom in Brooklyn. For friendship, fulfillment, and that loving feeling you’ve been longing for, write to the Cassie J Sneider Fanclub International, PO Box 2333, Lake Ronkonkoma, NY 11779
The Tusk 
One Response to “Grandpa”
Lots of love to you Cassie!!!! Your grandpa is very proud of you.xoxo