My grandpa died 28 years ago. I still have strong memories of him, but most of the images that come to mind are still, based on the few photos I have of him, from a certain date that I can find in my photo collection. What is left are not the details of his face, but where we were, and how I felt, and what we were doing. I was happy where my grandpa was, but I think I was happy generally, as most of us fortunate kids are.
He died of lung congestion, in that vicious circle we play in medicine between kidney failure and heart failure, until we run out of options. I suppose you have to work backwards from a person's death to relive their life.
I think he died of iatrogenic causes, having been given gold for what was probably non-inflammatory arthritis from manual labour of a lifetime, but maybe gout. His go-to meal was meat and potatoes, after all, but likely full of garden vegetables and homemade canned food and a few scotch mints and a healthy dose of exercise.
He was on dialysis for a few years. I don't think he had ever made a living will. I wonder how it ended sometimes. I hope it was quick, and that he was appropriately sedated. It's a tough way to go; breathless.
He was a farmer, and then a mayor with political ties to the NDP. As a city girl, it was mostly PC or liberal politics around me. I dreamed of growing up on the farm, asking my parents to move to the country, or at least overseas, probably because we were close enough to it through my rural living grandparents. Grandpa had enormous hands, from the manual labour (and arthritis), and was always fixing stuff in the barn, had rifles in his basement, and loved a good golf game. He drove a truck, and my cousins and brother would jump in the back thoughtlessly and dare each other to sit on the gunnels unless we were moving fast. We would always pass through main street slowly, my grandpa raising his fingers to each passerby without his hand leaving the steering wheel. We would turn right past the granary, then left onto the highway. We hung out at the "old farm", and depending on the season, we were watching the adults digging potatoes in the enormous garden, picking saskatoonberries, or checking out the pussy willows around the slough. My cousins (boys) drove young and liked to aim for gophers. I don't remember them ever hitting any, but they probably did. My one chance to drive the tractor resulted in me pulling down part of the fence, when I realized too late that my excellent skills getting the cab through was not enough to have accommodated for the wider back end. After that, my aunt and grandma were the only ones to take me out, and in the car off the farmyard property!
My grandparents made it look easy. They worked hard, but they knew how to the do the job. I never saw my grandma walk around the block, but she could feed a crowd in a heartbeat, and drive the grain truck in synchrony with the combine in the late summer when the wheat was harvested. She was friendly, and busy, but dropped everything to watch her "stories" when they were on, a few hours of soap operas, doing busy work sometimes but not always. She had a pantry at the ready, with a garden in town and on the farm, and yet she still had the vanity to stuff her closet with clothes and had matching necklaces and clip-on earrings in every colour. She would regularly transition from what she was doing to playing the piano or organ or accordion. There was no downtime in that house. Work and music were the seemless soundtrack of our stay.
Grandpa was the athlete, and the politician. Grandma was the musician, and housewife. They were a wonderful pair!
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