Bernard

Maybe it’s because I live in Europe, but lately I’ve been thinking about the kinds of drawers that you find in apothecaries. That wall of mini wooden drawers, so neat and stacked and compact that you can open them with a single hooked finger. And in those drawers, I’ve been picturing all the people that I know. I think about these friends and family stretched out across the world who I see very little of, if at all.  I imagine myself looking in on them, from time to time, but ultimately not knowing what goes on when I close them back into their respective boxes. Sometimes I might catch whispers and snippets of their lives, but ultimately I’ve left them be.

In one of those drawers, my grandfather died.

I’ve stayed up late, mostly thinking of how little I’d talked to him in the past year. How my mom had told me months ago that he was getting increasingly hard to get a hold of and that he wasn’t returning her calls. I thought of how he’d been in good spirits after beating cancer, years ago, and how we suspected it had probably returned. That the news had crushed him, made him secretive, and drawn him inward. And there he was, filed far away, all the way in Florida during a pandemic when we had no vaccines and he was too old and risky to visit. I don’t have any idea what he’d been through or dealt with all those months on his own. He lived independently up until they found him, where he’d been nonresponsive on the floor for hours. A medical emergency right by a busy beach and on a sunny main road with cars going past all the time, then him in his apartment alone. Tucked neatly behind four walls.

We told him to keep a phone on him at all times, just in case. He told us he was invincible.

He weighed 130 pounds when he died.

The last time I’d seen him, some summer three years ago, he’d been eating a four-pound lobster on a Cape Cod pier, surrounded by seagulls, plastic menus, and sunburns. Then he’d gone south to follow his horses and I’d moved away, and he lived in that little compartment in my mind, still full-on seafood and his single Bud light. In all that time, I hadn’t opened that drawer. I’d wanted to keep that image of the seaside and him happy, for no benefit but for my own.

I’m not traveling home for the funeral. Everyone’s so old and high-risk that we’re going to do it virtually. Instead, I’m filling up that little drawer with things that remind me of him, until I can stuff it closed and lock it neatly shut. I want to press my mind to it and hear hoof beats and smell cigars. For there to be whisky, gold teeth, fluoride, the crusty poodle-dog, feathered fedoras, smoking jackets, cats, the big piano that nobody but him could play, and that sweet and sweaty smell of the horse track. Of people calling him Doc and Barney and soldier and father. And me little and running up the stairs of his brown split level on all fours because they were so steep, then jumping up at the top to meet him in the kitchen. The room warm and the porch door open with the green forest bright behind it and the sound of splashing in their pool. And me panting from all that running around outside, then turning to him and shouting, grampy guess what, guess what.

And him saying, what, what, what.