Keep Moving
My grandfather is dying. Drifting through half-consciousness in a hospital bed after a five-hour four-way bypass operation that sees him left with tubes twisting out of his body, surrounded by machines, wires holding his breastbone together, a vein from his leg now bound into his heart. The body is a machine: how can you believe that the soul isn’t inextricably bound up with the body when you see an old man lying broken? Most of my family will believe that they will see him again, after he dies. I think I have seen less and less of him even while he has lived out the last years of his life, and that after he is dead all that will remain are traces: stories, photographs, his posessions; memories. The last time I talked to him was also the first time he ever gave me advice, and the advice was: keep moving. From nowhere; everything I remember of him was motionless: no life changes, no thought changes. The ease with which I slip into the past tense while he still lies breathing, heart beating, in his bed. He stood for me as the pinnacle of what it is to hold unwavering beliefs, but in retrospect so much of this idea of him has been mediated through other people; in fact, I don’t think I ever heard him talk of his own beliefs. He converted to Seventh-Day Adventism after marriage, and quit smoking cold after years of a pack a day. Mum describes the family holiday where he quit: the image of him pacing up and down the beach, not saying a word to any of his family for the whole holiday. The only stories I have from his own mouth are about the war, where he served as a non-combatant due to his Seventh-Day Adventism; he survived two sunken ships in the Pacific working as a clerk. Beyond that, a hazy expanse of questions: What was he like before marriage? Is the reason for his silence about his past regret from the lense of his later beliefs, or simply innate introvertedness? I haven’t been to many funerals, but something a funeral seems to do is to establish a definition of a person in hindsight, to resolve the real ambiguities about a person into a set of words that collapse with them into the grave. There is a strangeness associated with hearing stories about a person; as you hear more, your ideas of them in one sense expand and in another collapse. I wish I had more stories of Papa.
May 25th, 2002 at 11:03 am
i’m scared one day in the hospital bed i will look at my kids kids and have nothing to say. somewhere along the line papa was conversationally shut down. whether it was from birth, the war, or nana, i will always wonder.