A Veteran's Day Remembrance

This Veterans' Day weekend, I am remembering my grandfather - a Veteran, a member of The Greatest Generation, and a D-Day survivor; a man who, at age 65, stepped up to father my brother and me. At a time when he would have rather retired he chose to keep working, because that was what men of his generation did to show their love and support - they brought home a paycheck to those who depended on them...

I cannot say "Grumpa" and I always got along - in fact, I would be lying if I did and my entire family would be quick to remind me that it was I who gave him his cherished moniker, at the age of seven, when I was outgrowing my fear of his grumpy nature but still too young to understand that discipline and vocational training were the ways he expressed his love. I can still hear his gruff voice reprimanding me, with a "Kimmy, stop using that calculator! You'll never learn to do math if you use that thing!" ("Then why do you use it, Grumpa?" would be my sullen response, muttered under my breath so as not to tempt him to finally make good on his oft-made but never actualized threat to whip me with his belt)...

It was somewhere around the age of ten - after the birth of my youngest cousin - that Grumpa realized it was not his job to raise his grandchildren; it was their parents job - to raise them and to discipline them - but much to his chagrin, not to feed them; or so he felt. With eight of twelve grandchildren living locally, we were frequently there to visit with Grandma who insisted on feeding us whether we were hungry or not; ergo, we always came hungry and left happy, bellies full of Grandma's excellent cooking and ears full of Grumpa's grumblings. It was only as an adult that I learned to forgive him; raised during the Great Depression, he understood better than most the value of things and never took without first giving...

I was twelve when my parents divorced, and nobody took it harder than my mother and my brother - except maybe Grumpa (not that I didn't love my father, but he informed me of his plan to leave months before, so it came as no shock when he finally walked out). Grumpa, on the other hand, saw it as a personal failure that he had given his approval for my mother to marry my father, in spite of his misgivings about her choice of husband - misgivings he freely expressed at their divorce trial. In spite of the judge's obvious displeasure of the disturbance to his courtroom, Grumpa was undeterred. It took the threat of a contempt charge to silence him. To this day I am dying to know what he said, and to this day nobody will tell me. Grumpa was a protective man, and I suppose my continued ignorance of his screed is a part of that protection; nobody wants to see their parents' failings, and having never seen my Grumpa lose his famous temper was, in a way, how he chose to protect me from some of the ugliness of the world...

I was twenty-one, Grumpa seventy-three, when my Grandma died. It was the first time I ever saw Grumpa cry. While he was embarrassed by such a show of "babyish" emotion, it humanized him to me. I had never seen him express weakness before, real or perceived, in spite of a war injury that was supposed to "take twenty years off of his life". Seeing his tears scared me, like a dam was bursting and the floodwaters were going to take the town away with it, but his response to those tears angered me. I recall telling him that his wife of fifty years had just died, and that he had earned the right to mourn. I also recall him looking up at me, his clear gray eyes filled with disgust, and saying, "49 years, 8 and a half months". Grumpa, a Machinist, valued precision in all measurements...

Grumpa mourned Grandma until the day he died. A handsome man, he flirted in return with the many senior ladies who expressed interest in him, and on occasion would share a Caffeine Free Diet Coke with them (he thought I didn't know what a wild and crazy guy he was!), but he never took things any further; his heart belonged to his wife. In the end, it was his heart that felled this giant of a man who I once thought invincible...

In the last year of his life, Grumpa spent more time in the hospital than out of it, so I put my own career on hold to care for him in an attempt to grant his wish of dying at home. While he had the strongest work ethic of anyone I know, he never understood the concept of a working woman, so he gave me no guff. It was during these months, in one of our many bedside conversations, that Grumpa decided he wanted to die on a Thursday - this way, the wake could be Friday, the funeral Saturday, and nobody would miss a day out of work for him. He was quite pleased with this idea, and held fast to it - he would pass on a Thursday. For the next several Thursdays he would announce to me that he would not be dying this Thursday, but perhaps Thursday next; he had not yet decided (as if he had a choice in the matter?)...

This dynamic went on for better than six months, with frequent reminders that I should not to make Friday night plans, just in case I ended up having to cancel to attend his wake. Finally, Grumpa decided it was time. Choosing to go for a stroll without his walker, he took a swan dive into the metal post of his bed frame, smashing himself in the temple, the fragile spot where one's jaw connects to the skull. Such a fall would have killed most people, but not Grumpa. It was, however, the start of his final week and it was during that final week that Grumpa reminded me one last time of his desire to pass on a Thursday.

That year, it just so happened that Veteran's Day fell on a Thursday, which gave Grumpa the incentive to hold on, in spite of his obvious suffering, if for no reason other than he needed to die as he lived - on his own terms. For three days longer than anyone expected of him, he held on through what must have been a physical Hell, head aching, lungs drowning in fluid from congestive heart failure, too weak from the morphine to speak in words but saying plenty with his gaze - at times, gentle, at times reprimanding; he never did fully accept that it wasn't his job to discipline me (my last words to him, before reading from the Bible I was holding, were "I accidentally stole this Bible from church", so I suppose I deserved that glare). At 12:05 AM on 11/11/04, Army Air Corps Staff Sargent Edward J. Dybala, Sr. passed at the age of 84, a soldier until the end.

I was given the honor of eulogizing him at his funeral, but that is another tribute, for another time. Wishing all who read this post a blessed Veteran's Day. Never Forget.


KJM
11.09.18

The In-Between Life

I am not a Mom and I will never be a Mom. When I share this fact with people I am almost always greeted with sympathy, as if I am somehow incomplete as a woman. If I am, I have yet to discover that fact about myself; I feel pretty complete as-is...with the exception of the parts that were surgically removed from me in order to keep me alive.

If you were able to put two and two together and come up with "Oh! She had her uterus removed!" then good for you; I will explain no further. For those who are still confused I suggest you take a course in basic human anatomy. From this point on, all I will say on the subject of why is that if you ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies. The difference between secrecy and privacy is in the details I choose not to share.

While I may not be a Mom, I am an Auntie to numerous nephews and nieces, and the "cool grown-up" to my cousins' young children (as the five-year-old so succinctly put it, "You're pouring your soda into a glass instead of drinking it from the can, so you must be a grown-up, but your more fun than other grown-ups"). As an Auntie/Fun Grown-Up, I do not have the pressures of being a parent by the simple fact that I can pick and choose when and where to be accessible to the children in my life, allowing me to properly plan - if I am going to be playing soccer or volleyball with the older kids, it's best I bring my sneakers; if the toddlers are going to be there, replete with sticky hands and runny noses, it's best not to wear a cashmere sweater. Sometimes life throws a curve-ball in the form of surprise visits from the little ones, and I need to go with the flow in order to maintain my (Sesame) street cred. Last night was one of those moments.

My brother-in-law brought by his three youngest children - ages 8, 3, and 16 months, and while I am always glad to see my nieces and nephew, my house is not childproofed and is far from child-friendly. I keep crayons, drawing paper, and coloring books in the office supply closet, but that's about it when it comes to children's entertainment. I don't dare turn on the television - the baby has learned how to operate the remote control, and I have no parental controls on my cable box. I am not sure I would know how to turn them on, if I could even find them, and the last thing I want is for her to tune into my Netflix account and to start streaming Orange Is The New Black. All I need is for the 8-year-old fashionista to start asking her Mom if she can wear more orange, since it is the new black.

Because I am an excellent cook (or so I have been told), the children all want to eat at my house; being children, all they want to eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (I will admit to mixing the sauce before adding the macaroni, but nothing more incriminating than that!). The stuff is incredibly cheap, so I buy it by the metric ton at the wholesale club and donate most of it to the local food pantry, saving a few boxes for when I want a bad case of diabetic shock or for when the kids visit. Since I don't find a trip to the ER for acute hyperglycemia enjoyable, I happened to have enough "Donald Trump orange" pasta to go around (yes, I went there. Sorry, not sorry; I couldn't resist and you were all thinking it). On this rare occasion, the kids didn't want pasta. They wanted...bananas and apple juice. Did I mention that I am diabetic?

One of my life's ironies is that I always wanted to have children. I love children, and I love nurturing them. Children can sense that, and in their innocence they see me as an adult who can provide for them. The toddlers wanted bananas and apple juice, and looked to me for bananas and apple juice - as if no house could possibly ever be without these ridiculously high sugar foods, as if no adult they trusted would ever be unable to fulfill their needs. It just so happened that I am making my "famous" banana bread for a church bazaar this weekend, and had some non-overripe bananas left over (my banana bread requires bananas so ripe they are practically liquefied inside the peel). As for the apple juice, it's autumn in New England, so I keep cider in the house to mix seasonal drinks for friends; mixed one part cider/one part water it makes, as the three-year-old put it, "THE BEST APPLE JUICE EVER!". Everyday miracles are the best.

Sometimes, I mourn the fact that I never had children - I think "Shall be alone when I am old?" but remember that having children is no guarantee that they will remain geographically close. I sometimes wonder, "Who will want my stuff when I die?" and then remember that even I don't want half of the stuff I have and that it's time for a yard sale. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a little person growing inside me, and then a friend with children will ask me what it's like to still be able to wear tank tops and high heels and to not have to cross my legs when I sneeze or cough? On the other hand, there's an upside to just being an Auntie but not a Mom - the "in-between" life may not be for everybody, but it fits me perfectly!


KJM
11.08.18