The Death of a Legacy

My grandfather died at 12:30 am on Saturday the 7th of October. He was 94.

He died with my mother and father at his side. With them, my two sisters. He went peacefully. He went with dignity. He went as we would all want to go. Suddenly and except for that moment, in extraordinarily good health.

Few men deserved it less.

I've never really understood why it was so socially unacceptable to speak ill of the dead. So today I sat with my father, who finally cried over the fact that he would never have the relationship with his father he so desperately craved his entire life and I wondered why none of us felt free to say what we were feeling. I watched my father's eyes well up with tears and his face redden in grief as he spoke words he needed to say. Finally.

He hated his father. He loved his father. He took on a tremendous burden to ensure my grandfather was cared for in his final years. That burden included hearing my grandfather say, every day, that nothing his son did was good enough.

I watched my father this afternoon just as I've watched him the past 41 years in every desperate attempt to please his own father, to make him proud. I watched him just as as I've watched my mother cook exactly the *right* food in exactly the *right* way, 3 meals a day, for a man who spent more than 40 years calling my mother every nasty name in the book.

A father who craved a father's love and never felt it.

And I realized that what I was feeling was not grief. It was not sadness.

It was guilt. It was anger. It was the feeling that only a child who feels keenly the sorrow of a parent can feel.

I hated my grandfather. I hated what he did to my father. I hated what he did to my mother. I hated what he did, directly and indirectly, to his grandchildren.

And yet I smile. Because in my grandfather's final moments my mother stood over his bedside praying for his very soul.

Which would have really ticked him off. And perversely, is exactly what he deserved.

We will travel to Nebraska, where he is to be buried, and we will pay our last respects. We will bury our guilt behind tears we'll call grief and then we will move on. We won't speak ill of him because after all, we are not to speak ill of the dead.

But we can finally move on.

He's God's problem now.