“Things go. Stories are what outlive us if we let them.”
When he moved into a small apartment near the hospital, I moved my weekends back where they should have been all along. I replaced his porch chair with one that didn’t creak and put it by his window.
I fixed the ancient radio that only gets three stations and learned which one plays the old standards he likes. We planted herbs in a plastic tub on his sill. He hands me the journal when his hand cramps and says, “Write that down,” and I do.
June came around again. I brought pot roast in a battered Dutch oven and he said it was close to mine but needed more thyme. We ate at his little table with the bad fluorescent light humming over us, and when I pulled a cake from a bakery box, he barked a laugh and said, “Don’t you burn my house down with all those candles.” We ate too much and he told me the story of the first birthday after my parents died, when he baked a lopsided cake and we sang off-key and I fell asleep with icing on my face.
I wrote it in his notebook. I still think about the house. I still see those broken ribs of roof when I close my eyes.
But I understand something I didn’t before. People die twice—once when their bodies give out, and again when the stories that hold their shape evaporate because nobody bothered to ask. I almost let that second death happen while I was busy being important.
I almost let the man who raised me go out without hearing me say the simple thing that weighs more than any degree or raise or apartment ever could. So I say it now. In the hospital.
In the new apartment. In the car with the phone held to my ear. “I love you, Grandpa.” He says, “I know,” the way he always has, like gravity, like sunrise.
If your phone buzzes and it’s someone who once held your handlebars, answer it. If you’re “too busy” for pot roast, go anyway. The old chair on the porch won’t wait forever.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it waits just long enough for you to come to your senses. I was lucky. And I’m not wasting another June.
