Through the Veil

Grandpa Clark (Riley Garner) has died, in the hospital, of old age (99) and pneumonia; he’s passed on to the next life.

My history with him is mostly withdrawn, sometimes affectionate, and often very cantankerous or even worse. I had a very similar experience with his passing as I did with his daughter, my mother-in-law Joan (with whom I have a similar history): circumstance taught him, exceedingly stubborn as he was, to accept help. For all the following, I would be boasting if the point was only that I helped him. The last day he was home, the morning of the day we later realized his oxygen supply was low (he had a breath mask and cable with oxygen tank) and he needed to go to the hospital, I was called by him to get help to head on his walker to the bathroom, and a while after he let himself into the bathroom he called urgently for me, and I came to see that he’d only just made it, but leaving a terrible mess anyway. In my weak first attempts to help it became obvious I wasn’t doing enough, and he was too winded, weak and agitated (and I didn’t know it at the time, but too short on oxygen) to help himself. “HELP! HELP!” he cried, trying to raise himself up. After cleaning up, after the long slow journey back to the living room he thanked me for the help, and this wasn’t the grandiose, over-the top thank you I’ve received when I finally get around to doing something like mowing the lawn. (As heroic as that actually is for me.) It was just a humble, dignified thank you.

All the time I’ve lived here in his basement, it’s been like there’s a dark cloud upstairs, and only a bearable light downstairs, for my shame that I have to live in his basement, for all my history of unhappiness with him, for how little he’s let me in, and I don’t think he’s even known how to, and for the futility of my largely unknowledgable attempts to connect and repair my damage with him. But the morning that he didn’t know he was saying goodbye to his home for the final time, Grandpa learned that he could trust me with the worst of messes, and that it was no mar on his dignity at all, and that I’m glad and able to help him. But it wasn’t just Grandpa that learned that.

Was it a day or so later? – I visited him in the hospital, after the doctors had said he could only have about a week to live. They didn’t know they were dealing with a Clark. A whole day of mortal battle to a person of average constitution is just breakfast for a Clark – he hung on for several weeks and the sickness cleared despite everyone’s expectations meanwhile. But I thought I wouldn’t see him again – and I only saw him briefly once again after that, while he was only coherent enough to know I was there – but I made a video recording of him holding his great-grandson, my son’s hand in farewell, and then I took his hand and looked at him in farewell. Through the full breath mask latched over his entire face, he looked at me in clear awareness, and the words came easily for him, spoken by him as a revelation to himself as much as to me:

“I love you! I love you!”

The words were easy to return, and true. It had been later in the day after I’d helped with his mess at home, after they took him to the hospital, that I came home to the house after work and the cloud was lifted. It wasn’t just a physical mess I had cleaned, and not just his mess either. It was my mess too. It took a lot of water and soap, many towels and washcloths, and a lot of straining and lifting to clean up thoroughly. I changed him into new undergarments and new clothes, before he was ushered through doors into rooms where he waited to pass the final curtain, reaching to meet his maker, who forgets every mess, who fills the house with light, top to bottom.