by
Ryan Bradley
Grandpa Luis often told me stories
about growing up in Mexico. My family lived in the in-law apartment of his big,
white colonial house from the time I was three until the time I was five. He
told me how their dogs lived on the roof to guard against intruders; how the
government tortured his father to death during the revolution; how his mother
sent each of his siblings to the seminary, and out of eleven, only two actually
became priests; and how the Brothers at the seminary whispered about how deep
in prayer he was as he slept in the pew.
My favorite stories were about his
medical school mariachi band, La Tuberculosis. He would sing me the songs in
Spanish and translate them into English: I
love you my darling, so please accept this lung-chunk. I coughed it up for you.
The story he liked best was how they
forgot their permit one night. Permits weren’t hard to get, and once they had
one, the band could serenade as many girls as they liked. One night, all of
them thought that someone else had got the permit, understandable with thirty
medical students moonlighting as mariachis. A police officer rounded the corner
as they were singing a song my grandfather often sang to me, “Cielito Lindo.”
The officer asked to see their permit.
“You know,” the officer said when they
couldn’t show him one, “That’s my wife’s favorite song, and you play it
beautifully.”
The officer brought them to his house,
and they played it for her. And then another. And another. The officer made
them serenade his wife all night, but a day of classes tired from playing music
is infinitely better than one tired from a night in jail, not to mention what his
mother would have said if she found out.
He kept playing music in America. He
would play guitar and sing with my Aunt Debbie when the family got together, especially
around Christmas time. He loved music. A lot of people had trouble
understanding him because of his accent, but picking out the words was natural
for me.
Once I started playing guitar, he
and I would play together. Of course, I wasn’t good enough to play much of
anything at the time, and his sight was going, but we made it work.
Medicine was another one of his loves.
He stayed up late at night reading medical journals. He gave the entire
Archdioceses of Fairfield free check-ups, and around Christmas time he would
send families that he knew were tight with money their medical bills stamped
“Paid in Full.”
He believed that academics had helped
him become what he was: a doctor, the father of six children, and a happy man.
He came to all of my academic ceremonies and encouraged me. He said the same
thing at all of them: “Learn as much as you can. Knowledge is the only thing
that no one can ever take away from you.”
When he lost his sight, the state
forced him out of practice, so he trained medical students to become doctors.
One day he came in slurring words and his trainees caught it. They told us it
was probably a stroke, but it was a malignant brain tumor.
After the surgery, they weren’t sure if
he’d know English or Spanish or any of the five languages he spoke. After the
surgery, he seemed like he remembered all of them, but each day a few more
words slipped out of his vocabulary. It wasn’t bad at first. Who cares what he
called a tea cup?
At Thanksgiving the names went. He
hugged us, but the names were jumbled. He called Joe “Louis” and Kathy “Annie.”
He broke down in the kitchen. My Uncle Joe was holding his left arm and my Aunt
Kathy his right.
“It’s frustrating,” he said. “I know
your names.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Uncle Joe said. “It’s
the disease. No one’s getting mad at you.”
My Aunt Kathy squeezed his arm in
agreement.
None of them saw me, standing at the
edge of the kitchen. I wanted to jump in. I couldn’t pick out the words to make
it better. Instead I walked away. Knowledge is the only thing that no one can
take away from you.
Every night a different child stayed
the night with my grandparents. My grandmother was going crazy taking care of
him and dealing with the pain from her diabetic foot sore. She wasn’t willing
to stay in bed so her foot could heal while her husband died.
Wednesdays were my mother’s days. She’d
take him to get radiation treatments and then back to our house for family
dinner.
The first time, he even got up and
danced to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And after each song, he’d say,
“Beautiful, beautiful.”
After I exhausted the five or so I
thought he would recognize, I’d play the stuff I wanted to play. Joe Satriani.
Steve Vai. Yngwie Malmsteen. Speed metal and instrumental guitar songs.
And after each, he’d say, “Beautiful, beautiful.”
The last time I saw him, they’d brought
a hospital bed into his entertainment room. He’d bought a sixty-inch television
right after he went blind, and he’d put his nose on the screen to see the
soccer players. His hair and his vocabulary were gone. I didn’t know it would
be my last time seeing him, but around then, every time I saw him felt like it
would be the last.
I hugged him. He didn’t say anything.
All the words were gone. I squeezed tighter. I looked down at him and felt the sting
of dryness before tears form.
“I love you, Grandpa,” I said.
He sat up a little bit and tried to
speak. I didn’t understand him. I rested my head on his chest and hugged him
tighter. “What, Grandpa?”
He said it again, but I couldn’t pick
out the words. I don’t know what he said, or if he tried to say it again after
I walked out. I couldn’t take it. I left him there, mumbling.
I tell myself he was trying to say, “I
love you, too.” The subject is taboo in my mind. Grief, wrapped into a box
somewhere on a shelf near the back wall. I should have stayed. I should have
waited for the words that weren’t coming.
Two days later, my mother ran down the
stairs to my father.
“He passed,” she said.
I didn’t cry that moment or that day. I
held it in until the funeral. The weight of the casket shocked me as I carried
it down the aisle. My Aunt Debbie sang beautifully, and he would have loved
that. My Grandmother’s brother and Luis’s best friend Great Uncle Jim delivered
a beautiful eulogy. I remember laughing at a joke about how Jim’s parents made
him chaperone all of Grandpa Luis’s dates with Grandma Marie. Then I burst.
I dribbled snot on the sleeve of my new
suit. I tried my hardest to stop, but settled for not sobbing more than four or
five times. Someone rubbed my back. A priest came off the altar to try and
comfort me. None of it helped.
I’ll never know what he tried to say to
me, but after six years the last words don’t seem as important as the ones that
came before.
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