cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Funeral There is more to life than happiness. I buried my grandfather today. In the funeral home I sat and looked at his face from across the room for a long time. His mustache seemed like it wasn't quite the right color. I helped to carry his casket. It was smooth, greyish metal with thin, strong slats for handles. The lead-lined casket was heavy but it was not hard to carry. He was dead. To see his face and his still hands there was no mistaking the fact that he was dead. All at once there was an absence and a presence in his house where I stayed. I slept in his bed and emptied the loose change and money clip and iPod from my pocket onto the same bedside table where his own scattered coins and cell phone and a dollar bill were left. The house was still so full of him. Leftovers in the fridge. His camera left on the charger and his watch by the bed. His watch. No man ever had as many watches as he did. Not without being a collector. My grandfather was not a collector of watches. He was a man who just had watches. He would buy a wrist watch and the battery would run down and rather than replace the battery he would buy a new watch. Yet he could not bring himself to throw away the old one, so his house is littered with the things. Open any drawer or cabinet in the house and sort through the contents and you will find at least one and as many as a dozen old watches and watch bands. I can imagine him sitting here in the room with me right now. He always seemed so young. He married at 18 and my father was born a year later. Even in the last few years it never occurred to me that he was getting old. He was 78 when we buried him this morning. I suppose that 78 is supposed to be old but he remained a smart ass to the very end. Always a funny guy, always aware of what was going on in the world and always ahead of the rest of us on the technology curve. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out his remote controls yesterday before giving up. There was nothing 'old' about him. My grandmother died in that house years before I was born. She died with 5 of her children almost directly above where I slept. I heard today that the first firefighter to arrive stepped on her as he came through that bedroom window. She had collapsed mere inches from the open window over the covered porch with one of her girls in each arm. Another 5 or 10 seconds on her feet and the 3 of them would have lived. The loss of her and the children was a massive weight on him for the rest of his life. I rarely mentioned her in his presence because it was the only subject that ever dampened his humor. After the fire a whole new chapter of his life started. The 3 surviving children were in their late teens and were out on their own in only a few years. He lived alone. He traveled around the world, which I know about from pictures but he rarely spoke about where he'd been. Algeria, Morocco, Hong Kong, Paris, Egypt. When he had the tombstone made at the family plot, he had them carve his name and date of birth in above his wife's. The date of death was the only thing missing when we put him in the ground today. In this second or third chapter of his life, I happen to know that he came to have some participation in gay culture. I don't know if he ever personally identified as gay or bisexual or what it was. I don't think that anyone in the family except for me knows about this. Even I only figured it out from a few clues that I won't get into here. Alone in his room, I thought about the fact that he'd clearly worked hard to keep that part of his life a secret. Since I already knew, nothing was going to change in that regard. So I searched the room and found the single piece of evidence that someone else might have picked up on. In a jewelry box with various other mementos of his travels was a token or coin from a gay bar in Denver. There was no mistaking what this thing was. I held it in my hand and decided to put it in my suitcase so nobody else would find it. His secret will be as safe as I can keep it for him. I have told no one else of any of this, except for Jenny last year. Even Trish will never know about it. His surviving daughter is openly gay and lives happily with her girlfriend who is fully accepted as a member of the family. So there would have been no discrimination against him, but he chose a certain identity and I feel it is my responsibility to protect that for him. I was thinking about that coin in my suitcase during the funeral today. While I leaned into the back of the hearse to push the heavy metal casket over the shining steel rollers. Here was a man who was apparently gay all that time. Was it some great relief to find himself suddenly without a wife and a tether to home in the 1970's when gay bars were suddenly everywhere? No. He would have traded every minute of those trips to foreign countries for one more hour with her. One more minute. He would have given up all of that freedom to be what he wanted, go where he wished and do whatever he wanted. All of it he would have happily traded back for the life he'd had before, frustrating as it must have been at times. There is more to life than happiness. More to life than my own personal happiness. What is important and necessary and good does not have anything to do with what I want to experience for myself. I have a set of duties to exercise for people who matter to me even though they so often fail me. It is not about me. The duty of the patriarch is not to himself - that is part of what makes him a patriarch. My duty is to make a comfortable, happy life for Trish and for my children and for their children and for my other family and friends and for everyone else for whom I am able. Even if that means that I am unhappy for the next 50 years. I am the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son. It may go even farther back than that, for all I know. My responsibilities to the entire family are unique because of this. When I am about to have the ventilator turned off in a hospital room many decades from now, that is what will really matter. That is what will determine whether or not I have the full compliment of pall bearers and the kind of funeral procession that stops traffic for an hour. I am not going to leave anyone. ____________________
Yet I am here in Canada for the first time. I like visiting new places but it is bittersweet as I realize that I shouldn't be here at all. _______________
There is still the matter of the murderer being at large. The man who started the fire and murdered my grandmother and 5 of her children is known to us. I picked the investigation up last year and made some headway into his background and later crimes (he killed again, repeatedly), but lost the threads of it when I went in for surgery and spent a week or longer in the fog of painkillers. As the eldest son of the eldest son, I think it is my duty to take charge of this thing that nobody else has picked up. If I can find the murderer and either send him to prison for it or otherwise extract vengeance for my family's deaths then I will have done my duty and honored my grandfather. 12:28 a.m. - 2010-06-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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