Memoir - How my Grandfather Died

I never met my grandfather, and until I was in my mid-fifties hadn’t even seen a photograph of him. My father shared two different stories with us children; one in which Grandpa James was angry at our Aunt Joan and while chasing her she climbed a ladder to the loft and dropped a typewriter on his head. The other story was about Grandpa’s death. This story had several variations.

Grandfather James died at forty-four years when my father was thirteen. Dad remembers that summer well. My Grandmother had her hands full with the garden and caring for her youngest, rambunctious son. It fell to my father to follow his father from the ranch to town to make sure Grandpa James didn’t expose himself to young girls in the grocery store parking lot.

Even though the summer days were dry and spiked into the hundreds, I imagine Grandpa pulling open a calf-length, dirt-covered duster-coat, the type favored by cowboys in epic Westerns. He was almost a handsome renegade with a welcoming gesture of good will to the virgin high-school girls. I prefer this picture than to the more likely pathetic reality I’ve seen too often along bush-lined walkways in Seattle Parks; a physically broken, toothless man, pulling his pecker out of dirty pants, tugging it to a semi-flaccid awareness like a Cucumber-Sea slug falling over his hand. His eyes rolled back, lip trembling, and then abruptly jerking his head down to leer at ladies who looked away, who hurried off, disgusted and yelling for the cops, again.

Grandpa’s sudden and unexpected heart attack relieved my dad of this duty. Dad kept the memories of the heart attack close, and every anniversary of Grandpa’s death Father announced that he too, at that exact same age was doomed to die of a stealthy heart attack. Every year Dad counted out for us how many years remained until his heart was to burst.

Grandfather died at the age of Forty-nine. My father was seventeen and nowhere around. He had lied about his age to join the army.

Grandpa James complained over dinner about recurring headaches, then –bingo- had a stroke. In the following weeks Grandpa grew increasingly irrational and hostile. I fancy he forgot where he was and mistook my Uncle Roy for an Orchard Inspector, or he kept yelling for more coal to feed the England-bound ship that he’d been for one year a youthful Merchant Marine.

Perhaps Grandpa threatened to back-hand Grandma, because though usually an empty threat it is the kind made by the men in my family. I like to think Grandma had the body strength to barricade herself in their bedroom by pushing the four-drawer dresser in front of the door; the dresser which had a velvet top and showed off all the brooches, hat pins and clip-on earrings Grandpa bought Grandma whenever the harvest paid well. Enlisting the assistance of Uncle Roy Grandma transported James to Eastern State Medical Hospital in Medical Lake. Grandpa did not go easily. Likely Grandmother drove while Uncle Roy sat on Grandpa James.

Grandfather’s older sister Winifred was committed to Eastern State Medical Hospital while in her teens. Winnie no doubt was still a hospital patient when James was admitted, and I like to envision them sharing a catch-up over chamomile tea and shortbread sitting in shade of the large Magnolia in the yard. Did Winnie and James share a precocious and extreme sensitivity to the outrageousness of Capitalism, or to other human-constructed foolishness? Did they both respond with dark rages and self-harm? Regardless, they must have shared these stormy moods with their younger brother Robert. Robert had moved to California, and spent the majority of his own life in a sanatorium. I used to believe that I had inherited this family craziness.

I won’t believe Winnie was mentally ill, at least not in our current understanding of mental instability. Likely, Winnie was incorrigible the way all girls refusing to conform to oppressive cultural mandates are incorrigible. I like to think she was a part of women’s suffrage.

 Winnie was an intelligent student and rumored to be wicked on the piano. She was beautiful enough to draw the attention of plenty of suitors offering to fill the emotional void left from her father’s recent death. Surely her mother caught Winnie masturbating one too many times, and there it was Winnie was clinically unsuitable for the normative domestic life. What’s a single mother struggling to corral five sons and an incorrigible daughter to do?  Winifred was institutionalized for forty years before dying in the institute.

Because I am that incorrigible, because I am just as coarse, uncouth, impudent, and insubordinate as any woman institutionalized in the 1940s and because I cannot envision these characteristics being either sin or madness, it is easier for me if I let Winifred be schizophrenic, or manic-depressive colored by Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or kleptomania. It is beyond me to conceive, as my father once suggested, that Winnie happily entertained the other inmates, blithely unaware of any alternative life her mother cut short, and happy to be of service.

I refuse to imagine that they administered the then widely-used cliterodectomy, her pelvic nerves systematically traumatized and damaged, or amputated; a permanent end to self-pleasuring. Lord, even electroconvulsive therapy would be better than that. When that thought creeps in then I add my grandfather, sitting with her, crying.

Even though asylums were overflowing I am sure that Grandfather stood out. Belligerence had been one of Grandpa’s recurring problems and no doubt the Doctors at Eastern knew him by name. Despite their highfalutin words and his artless vocabulary Grandfather would have charmed them. My family is replete with charismatic men. Perhaps the Doctors explained current treatments to him in excited tones, highlighting the Industrial Age’s medical advances over the Dark Age’s bloodletting and lunacy chains.  Or about how insulin shock therapy induced one into a comma and when revived, well wasn’t it obvious that Grandfather was so much calmer? 

While in Eastern my grandfather died from induced diabetes while in a comma. He was Forty-eight and my father doesn’t remember anything more about it.

I feel certain that the despotic medical staff administered some type of a lobotomy; either a bilateral cortical excision or an ablation of the frontal cortices. Maybe they stuck what looked to the layman like knitting needles just deep enough into his eye sockets to undo the emotional seat. My grandfather died without his emotions fully intact. No matter what the actual age, I will always picture him at thirty-six, hunched over in a wheel chair and a sugar-saturated touch of drool on the right corner of his slightly agape mouth.

After his release from Eastern, Grandpa tried to work his ranch. He didn’t have the physical energy. One son was in the navy. Another had run away to a technical school in Texas and got married, spitting out kids of his own. One son was born mentally deficient and could only be trusted with labor, not with strategic thinking. Grandfather had to teach everything he knew to the crippled son who was destined to inherit everything.

All of Grandpa’s life he had strived to get-ahead. I think he died of an overwhelming sense of failure, because I understand that. Or maybe he died of exhaustion. Exhaustion feels just like failure.

Grandpa James worked thirteen hours a day, pruning, cultivating, irrigating, planting, grafting, thinning, spraying, propping and picking in his apple orchards in Oroville. He sprayed toxic pesticides over the trees several times a year. He didn’t wear a face mask as he wandered through the face-high slung clouds, stopping occasionally to wipe powder off his glasses. Breathing unregulated pesticides killed Grandfather.

 Grandpa smoked unfiltered rolled cigarettes that he carried in a small metal box, folded into the sleeve of his t-shirt. When his coughing didn’t subside Surgeons in Seattle cut him open and found lung cancer. It had spread to his heart. Grandpa James died of lung cancer. He was fifty years old. My father hadn’t yet actually left for college in Texas, but was living in the garage, practicing trombone. My dad didn’t pick up smoking, not because of his father’s lung issues, but because blowing trombone requires strong lungs. Years after this my father will tell me I should quit smoking. Smoking may help me understand my grandfather more intimately than my father’s stories of him.

The Seattle Doctors put Grandpa James on permanent bed rest until James finally died of throat cancer. He was fifty-two and a half years old. For months he couldn’t speak. Perhaps he thinking some simple thought he no longer had the capacity to fully develop.

Grandma found time to sit beside him and read from the bible, despite his waving her away or pointing to the Reader’s Digests which he preferred. He wrote letters to his eldest son. “Don’t grieve as I have had a lot of fun in my time and have never pulled a chicken-shit trick in all my life. I take pride in saying this so will depart with no regrets but rather with relief that an odious condition is terminated and over.” He was a man who never lied. He never took nothing. He didn’t covet. He gave poor folk vegetables from his garden. When he went on to his final resting place my grandmother grieved the death of a near-perfect man.

When I ask my father about Grandpa his story moves away and back in, like an empty bottle floating on a stagnant lake reels when boaters row or motor by, or when the wind stirs it on a whim of its own. After my father died and I went through some of his letters, I found a note from the uncles, instructing Dad to quit feeding misinformation to their children, and likewise to quit making up stuff for his own. I imagine my father never told me one word that was true.