Grandfather

Far away from home, it is not uncommon to spend parts of the day thinking of people elsewhere. Small things like a person walking down a street, sitting down to a meal, sunk in thought, asleep flit through your mind. In this way, though apart they remain close.

A long time elapsed between my mother's passing and her brother's. In the interim much had changed. Suddenly everything is ephemeral, my uncle's fall from a bus a loud announcement of impermanence and its ignorance of age.

My grandfather is in his late 80s, the oldest person I know. He is endlessly happy then filled with a moody surliness, endlessly pleasured by our existence and in this he never changes. He is seemingly eternal. Still, I began to think of age, of people passing, the world changing as it must.

What seems natural? My grandmother's passing in her 90s, my grandfather never leaving. A cousin wept when my grandmother died, I could not understand it. I spent a day thinking of my grandfather and I did. I am immensely sad even as I think the moment lies a decade away.

In this world, leaves fall, flowers bloom, seasons pass. Trees grow outside my grandfather's room. I wrote a poem on my mother, ill, supine, watching those trees. We all pass by now, staring, unseeing, through his room. My grandfather is a tree in the evening of his life.

In the infinite days of a long relationship, very few are illuminated. What is it to be 80? I cannot answer as yet. What is to be 40? To wish for eternity in those who rushed to hold you, new born, blinking at the light of day.

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