it was twenty years ago today (last week)

Late last week there were a few emails in my inbox that noted the passing of 20 years since my grandfather died.  I was surprised at myself for not remembering… because I usually think of it whenever there is a 9 on a day in February.  Oddly enough, the morning before I checked my inbox I just happened to notice the prayer card with the Irish blessing that I kept in my bedroom mirror after the funeral… and decided to replace last summer when I found it in a box.  But it fades into the delirium of every droopy eyed morning and night when I head off to sleep.  Except out of the blue, last Friday, it caught my eye.

The zero and two in the anniversary somehow make it more significant, or reason to give pause.  Something about those multiples of ten seem more momentous.  Or maybe it has more to do with the last year that I find myself stopping to give pause a week after I took the prayer card out of its nest for a few seconds of remembering.

I have a stash of photographs that I am slowly archiving for my family.  The slowness is due in part to other life distractions and in part to my lingering on each image, speculating on the story of the moments they capture.  I have come to ‘know’ my grandfather as an entirely different man than the intimidating authority figure who whistled on Sunday mornings as he came down for a breakfast in his yellow bathrobe.  Or the man who watched the Mt. Pleasant world go by with his cigarette and lawn chair at the top of the driveway.  In the black and white images, I’ve seen a young man in uniform, a dapper groom (still with that dooming cigarette), and a smitten husband at the bar with his wife… and a collection of pinups.  I see the goofiness of my peers in the party photos.  I see the family man that finally got in front of the camera when his grandchildren were born and made him beam in a way I now see in my father.  I see… I see the man I never knew as a child.

And I was a child when he died.  I never knew him as a fellow adult.  I never got to see in person the party host that my uncles laugh about at the Thanksgiving table.  I never got to know what he thought of me as the odd duck of my family who isn’t married with children.  Would he approve?  Or would he make the comment like my Gram that I chose an unusual path in life?  Would we laugh together?  Would he tell me the stories I want to know about his mother’s divorce?  I doubt that.  I know he would love me and be proud, as I suspect he would be of all my cousins and beam at their little ones the way he did towards me.  

I dream about him.  More than anyone that has left this world of the living.  Maybe it is that long held wish to have had a whisky with him… or maybe it is something other.  But I do pay attention when those visits occur.  It is unexplainable enough to not just let slip into the ether of mindless memory.

I always thought of that February day as an earthquake in my life… but now I see it more as a nail on which the tightly knit truths of my childhood got stuck and slowly started to pull apart.  I don’t know if twenty years gives that unraveling more clarity – now that I’ve seen how those threads have woven together with other experiences – but certainly I appreciate where that grief led me.

I imagine it would be disappointing to him that bearing witness to his dementia and the sudden exit of his heroic presence planted the seeds for the disintegration of my faith.  I simply didn’t find that comfort that everyone said came from believing in heaven.  (Of course, if you sit with me by the fire and a glass of wine, I will tell you how a hospital visit that winter prevents me from ever doubting the separation of body and soul)  My absolute Catholicism with which I entered college failed to deliver on its promises and everything I accepted as truth turned itself upside down on its head.

Although, to be fair, I can’t blame grief entirely.  Because just as I have reflected on the twenty year passing of that cold February week… I have thought about the other impressionable experience that happened soon thereafter.  And maybe that is the consequence of such a raw wound… but where the Bible failed to restore my spirits, Shakespeare did the trick.

After I came back from my February break and week of wake and funeral, I burrowed into the rehearsals for my first Shakespeare role, Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor.  So much of my freshman year is a fuzzy gray, but I do remember that it was the first time I was able to stay in Cambridge for a period of five weeks without the homesick ache to leave campus for the weekend.  And I was learning that language.  Laughing.  Dancing.  Having one of those mythical (and yet entirely real, which is why we are theater junkies) play experiences when each rehearsal, performance is like an intoxicating night spent with a lover.  It was so much fun.  We loved each other so much.  I remember the ache that came with the closing - and maybe that was delayed grief for my grandfather – except my fellow cast members felt the same, to the point we would sit on the benches in the Lesley quad just to be with one another again.  

But aside from that sentimentality, that production changed how I saw things.  It made me fall in love with Shakespeare’s language in addition to the experience of playing it on the stage in a costume.  I worked with a director and teacher who encouraged us to use our imaginations in the interpretation of the words.  But not just imagination.  Emotion.  The feeling in one’s heart, stomach, muscles, bowels, bones, groin… that the words and the feelings live somewhere else beyond our brains.   Things that didn’t necessarily resonate when I was 18 and still stumbling through my heart and mind and muscle memory of emotion… but definitely do now.

And that whole experience started to shift the prism so I began to realize words – old words – mean different things to different people.  That an ancient text has thousands upon thousands of meanings… and none of them are wrong, while none are completely right.  (And yes, I expect some scholars are going to argue this with me).  But… as someone who took literature and words so literally, that was a profound discovery.

I find myself thinking about these events of twenty years ago rather frequently of late.  On the level of time passing and appreciation for those snapshots that memory supplies of that weird (snowy, too) winter of 1994.  But also, on thinking of my place in the world and its arguments in the present day.  This last week has provided so much rhetoric about the concept of religious freedom masking the inhumanity of deciding a group of people are not worthy of equal treatment.  The person I was before these events of twenty years ago would completely embrace that logic.  Not only embrace, but crusade as vehemently for as I do now against.  

Of course, much more has happened in the interim of the decades since that could have just as easily informed my beliefs, but it does put into sharper focus how I began to grow up and see the world that spring.

I still wish I could have shared a whisky with him.