going... going...

My grandfather is dying. Has been for almost a year. He has end-stage lung cancer that they stopped treating about four months ago. He is 86 years old.

Right now, the majority of his remaining 7 children are gathered around him (his eldest daughter, passed of lung cancer in January of 2005), my sister KW is amongst the crowd. My mother will head to the family gathering sometime tomorrow as the vigil continues.

There is nothing for me to do, but wait for the wake and funeral. For the phone call to come with the inevitable news. It is a helpless feeling.

My father called me earlier today, shortly after his father received his Last Rites. The purpose of the call was to say my awkward and public goodbyes to a man who has been mostly enigma to me. I felt like crying, mostly because hearing the note of a break in my father's voice can inspire me to move mountains to attempt to salve his pain. I am never successful in my quest, but my father in distress is a motivator I don't fully understand.

I wanted to jump in the car and get there for the important part. For the departure. Funerals just don't make sense to me as a gathering place. Deathbeds seem more friendly-like. Am I bizarre? Maybe.

I wanted to get in the time machine and have one more real and lucid conversation with him, ask some questions I never got answered. That's the real problem with "one last time." By the time you know that's what it is, it destroys the spirit of the actual conversation. Assuming there can be one.

And, there couldn't be now, anyway. In a sense, I was too late already when I went out there over the summer - you can't ask existential questions of a man who has already been given a death sentence. It's just not done. Best to talk about the weather and hope your toddler doesn't deliver him a death-blow of a cold direct from daycare. That's how it felt. A polite audience on plastic covered furniture. No real connection with the situation. All bright natural light and photo ops for albums that my daughter will see when she is older. Proof.

From Charlotte's Big 4th of July

And, I'll always look at those photos and see a dying man. Not my grandfather. Not really.

He and I never had all that much in common. I don't think he understood a single decision I made as an adult. A quiet, introverted man, I think he found me to be a bit gauche, frankly. He wouldn't be the first.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time trying to draw him out, to learn more about him. But, I felt it exhausted him. And, as other distractions entered the scene, eventually, I gave up on it altogether.

Now I am just bracing for the inevitable. Sad that I never found a way to grasp the essence of the man who shaped the way my father shaped me. Sad that I will have to watch people I love, be sad. Sad that there is nothing I can do to fix them. Or me.