Extinct

i saw my step-grandfather this past weekend. he made me sad, and kind of grossed out. he used to be a real asshole to his grandkids when we were little. i am the oldest and only one who really picked up on it. he was the kind of asshole you might hear talking badly, berating some kid, who'd you want to jerk the kid away from and save. now, he's 94 and totally about to bite it. i stopped talking to him about 20 years ago. maybe i've said 10 words since then. he has dementia now and is going to have surgery on his prostate soon. basically we all got together because no one thinks he's going to make it. i didn't plan on being there, but i was surprisingly in town and decided to pay a pre-wedding PR visit to my equally distant aunt and uncle.

(wind blowing through a tunnel)

he didn't recognize me. well, at first when i walked in, his nose was bleeding. my aunt stood over him holding a bloody cloth to his nose and his head was bent over backwards at a right angle. when the bleeding stopped he straightened his head and looked straight at me. i could see he didn't recognize me. guy started to introduce himself when i stepped in to do it. "this is my fiance, grandpa." he shook guy's hand and kept staring at me. his head had disappeared into his neck and his skin was stark white and flaky. his lips were pressed together and he was breathing really heavily, but only out his nose, so it was loud. his blue eyes had a white, ghostly apparition just covering the pupils. he stared at me, and i squirmed. i got sort of a sexual feeling from him that made me fidgety and unbearably self-conscious.

he sat there with a barber's "cloak" (what are those called?) on, and tiny whisps of silver hair on his shoulders. i thought to myself, "it looks like he's getting a haircut." but with a colostomy bag hanging next to him and dried blood on his face, something weirder seemed more likely.

once my aunt returned from picking up pizzas for the small gathering of 9, she stepped up behind grandpa with scissors and resumed cutting tiny gray whisps. i watched her hands lovingly stroke the top of his bald white head and wondered about how she had loved him her whole life. there was a favorite story that went around the family forever. once, when she was a little girl, and she did something bad, her mother ordered her father to take her into the bedroom and give her a spanking, just like he did for my dad and his brother. what really happened though, was my grandfather spanking the bed while telling my aunt to pretend to cry and scream out, thereby effectively tricking the family into thinking she was getting spanked.

(dead hair)

the worst part of the evening was when my mom suggested a photo be taken of the two of us. i smiled and nodded and sat next to him, his eyes never leaving me. by this time, my mom had caught him up on who i was, asking him, "Do you remember Lou, my daughter? this is her." he said as enthusiastically as possible..."ohh, yes." and i guess he did. after the picture was taken, i nervously kissed him on the cheek because that's what i would have done to my beloved grandaddy in his day. afterwards, this grandpa proclaimed loudly, in a flat, deaf voice, "NOW I LIKE THAT."

i couldn't stop looking at his pasty, one-dimensional white skin. eye contact was not an option. it reminded me of the space that hangs undefined between painful bursts of gas going through the large intestine.

i felt a little bit like i was being secretly molested because no one seem to notice the staring. but maybe it was something else freaking me out, and making me think it was a sexual vibe he was sending me, when he said post-photograph, "YOU SURE LOOK SWEET."

(climb the walls)

most of the evening he sat alone, in the shadows off the kitchen, with his barber's cloak still on, forgotten, left out of conversation. what was going through his mind then? all these alive people around him, my mom telling some story and wildly gesticulating with her back to him, everyone laughing. his head down.

as i spoke to my aunt, and she assured me that she would be at our wedding, i felt like i loved her, and felt good about being at the wince-worthy dinner. how weird. i mean, i've barely spoken to her for over a decade. she'd given me some hassles in my early years. now, her face has wrinkled considerably, and she seemed more human to me. her face-lift from 20 years ago...is like it never happened. my uncle acted like he was seeing a ghost when i put my arm around him and greeted him. he was always the only good one in the family. sticking up for us when the grandfather was mean, or my dad was over-disciplinary.

after a couple more bloody noses that no one ever explained, like it's part of having a prostate problem, guy and i left. guy said he felt privileged to bear witness to the family all together. like they will cease to exist in a few days, never to rise again.

in a way, he nailed it.

(extinct)