Most memories of my grandfather are vague and seem faraway now. But the memory of his dying is still strong and will never leave me.
The cold, green walls of the rest home with its sounds and smells of sickness and age repulsed me. As I followed my father down the long, ugly green hall, past rooms with staring faces and strange sounds coming from well worn throats, my youthful mind was sickened and I regretted my coming. Suddenly my father led me into a small room that looked exactly like the others, two beds of cold steel and white sheets, a black and white TV chattering to itself in the corner by a large frosted glass window, and a ragged, old curtain pulled partly across the middle of the room, supposedly to afford some kind of privacy. I looked quickly at the old creature in the first bed, his rattling snores quite disturbing. The small shrunken head sat in contrast to the vast white sheets that hung heavy on his puny figure.
As I came into the curtained off portion of the room. I heard my father quickly catch a breath. I looked at the mass that lay under coarse, white sheets of the bed. An old, bald head sat deeply in the pillow. Only a few features of that drawn, gray face were familiar to me. The eyes were ancient and tired with a look of faraway. A trace of their former wisdom and life flashed when they fell upon my father, but then were gone. The old hands laid like withered fruit on the blank, bare sheets.
There seemed no soul attached to this shrunken, old frame. And yet my father cried. He bent over that old body and cried till tears would no longer come. Strong emotion choked up inside me, yet I quelled it with only a few tears working their way down my face. But the hurt still built up inside me – that great hurt I felt for my father who had to see the deterioration of one who had loved him, raised him and made him what he is; a father’s son. And at that moment of time in my life I felt closer to my father than ever before.
We soon left that place of sadness and I felt that my life would not ever be quite the same as before. And as we drove away from that fortress of doom I gazed at my father and wondered when this time would come again – and then again come — this time for me.