so i stayed up late last night. my grandfather got me up to do something for him… i think take the dog out. then i went and took a “nap” until like 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Matty (the dog) jumped up and laid with me for a while.
anyway, so i get up, walk out into the family room, and there’s Matty all sprawled out and looking kinda sad and bored and tiredey.
my grandfather looks at me, and with great big wet tears in his throat he barely manages to squeak out: “I just feel so sorry for her.”
i ask him why, and look closer to make sure she’s still breathing! (she is.)
“because she needs a little exercise… I just think she’s depressed.”
and my heart just broke. my grandfather is the sweetest ol’ guy on the planet sometimes.
and lately he’s been having such trouble with his hip. he gets so frustrated, because he never wanted to get old and have to be waited on… and his father had Alzheimer’s (which is really cute at first but believe me is a real serious and life-threatening living hell), and he’s not so sharp anymore, which irritates the hell out of him.
i’m just so afraid he’s gonna someday just get too frustrated with being old and just give up. just throw his hands in the air and give up and say “da hell with it” (like he does) and quit.
me & my dad thought that getting him a dog would make him younger somehow… put a little life back into his old bones. but he’s still old, no matter how you look at it. he might be a little happier with a doggie around… but if he’s not able to run and play with it like he did with my dog 20 years ago, then he’s gonna get upset like he did today. poor old gentle grandfather.
i hate watching him get old.
when i lived in Florida, for a long time i worked at ABC Liquors. once in a while there would come in a sweet old man who looked a lot like my grandfather, who in turn looks a lot like the olde-tyme C&W singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. i used to have to fight back the tears that would well up in my eyes when i saw that nice old man… he reminded me of my grandfather, and reminded me of the fact that my grandparents just weren’t as young as they used to be.
and when i came home for vacation… my crying grandma, sweet grandma who died in front of me just a few years later… they both had grayer hair and i knew, i could feel it coming on… that damnable aging thing that just gets worse and worse and worse…
and a few years later, on my next vacation, i saw them and decided pretty much off the bat (before returning to FL to a missing television set and about 300 less CDs) that i would be coming back to Ohio to live as soon as i could (which ended up being even sooner than i had planned – less than 2 months later in fact).
tonight he couldn’t get up out of his chair for the longest time. at one point he just about broke, just about flipped his lid, pounding the kitchen table and cursing to beat hell. poor guy… i can just hear it in his blood, the agony of realizing that his time has come and gone, coursing through his veins…
i don’t want him getting any older than this, but i don’t want him to just up and die either. god, it’s so hard to watch this happen to someone you love so much.
all the girls love my grampa to pieces.
