he died on saturday, which was four days ago. my dad said my grandpa didn't take any pain medication. he went relatively quickly, due to kidney failure. from the time he got the flu until he died was eight days, i think
i drove to see my parents. their house is different. a realtor has prepared it for selling. a lot of its charm is gone, though my parents don't have a particularly keen eye for design
my dad said when his mom died last year, she was administered doses of fentanyl to deal with the pain
david and andrew both died, in 2015 and 2017, respectively, having ingested fentanyl, unwittingly. david thought it was heroin. andrew thought it was xanax
my parents gave me a lamp that had belonged to my grandpa. a client had sent it to him, i think. in 2016, my dad and i went to florida and moved my grandpa out of the house he'd lived in for thirty-ish years. it was a mess, utterly disgusting. we filled an enormous dumpster with trash, and it rained on the trash, because we were in sarasota in august. i was ill at health and breathed in a lot of unideal particles. we also gave a lot of stuff to goodwill, and had a salvation army truck come take other things, and then we also filled a storage unit with so much stuff that my grandpa claimed to want to keep, when my dad went back to open it the next day, items had, like, shifted, and he couldn't get the door to open
my grandpa also left a powder blue toyota camry in florida when he moved in with my parents. when his ex-wife, my grandma, died last year, my cousin, who'd graduated from college the day before, knowing she was going to die soon, and wanting to get to the nursing home (or did she die in a separate hospital) before she went, drove recklessly from massachusetts to connecticut, totaling his car in the process. later, he went to florida to get the camry as a replacement vehicle
my grandpa was still working when he got the flu, almost two weeks ago. he was a tax consultant, so i can't help thinking about all the people whose taxes he hadn't finished. they're going to be not feeling great, probably. that's got to be a confusing state to be in, and an extremely rare predicament... your private tax consultant dies in late february, having not filed your taxes... it's uncanny. but i guess that's what you get for employing an ailing eighty-seven year old man
in 2008, my grandpa and i drove to nova scotia together. he wanted to go alone, i think. he often traveled alone, to nature spots like that, to take photos and enjoy himself. he couldn't do the drive, though. his back wasn't good, and visibility in an unfamiliar place, over the steering, for instance, posed a basically deadly peril. so i went with him. we were gone for ten or so days, and we shared a few hotel rooms during that time. mostly we had separate rooms, but when we didn't, i saw him with his shirt off, and listened to him breathe and snore. it was uncomfortable, but i feel grateful anyway. we ate lobsters that weren't that good. it was august, also, then, and cold and a little rainy. i remember being in a barn-like restaurant, staying at a bed and breakfast in a very rural area. that was fun. i tried keeping a journal, i'd just recently fallen in love. there were mosquitoes at one of the lighthouses my grandpa wanted to photograph, and they got in the car just in the time he opened the doors. he couldn't get any pictures, there were just so many mosquitos. i was not discouraged from drinking beer, even though i was seventeen years old. i remember drinking a white russian, alone in a hotel lounge one night, kind of late, for some reason. we enjoyed listening to django reinhardt music together, and he hated the animal collective and radiohead stuff i played. most days were just spent driving. the roads were hardly highways. it just took a long time to get from one place to the next. on these drives, my grandpa talked a little about his time as a merchant marine. he mentioned a girl he'd met somewhere in south america along the coast, or whatever, and that the next time they were in port there, several months later, they met up and she was pregnant, and insisted it wasn't his, but he didn't seem so sure. he talked about how impregnating my grandma when she was nineteen and he was in his early twenties set his life off course and he couldn't become a journalist. one timeh he asked me to get him something out of his suitcase and i found a thing of condoms and viagra. it was funny to imagine how he possibly thought those things would come in handy, but i guess he figured it was better to be prepared
it seems my dad still uses condoms when he has sex with my mom. i remember finding used ones under the bed, even as old as i was a teenager. just on this past trip, i saw an opened wrapper at the top of a trashcan, just as it appears in a scene in my novel. but my mom can't get pregnant now. and they could've used other birth control methods, after almost forty years of marriage, why stick to the most uncomfortable (and now, menopause-ally obsolete) one? i have some theories as to why, but i don't care to type about them here
my grandpa married three times, and he owned many cats and dogs and birds over the years. i was at his house a couple times around the early 2000s. there was an unfriendly dog on the street when i tried out my skateboard in some december in the late nineties. there were alligators, and he lived in a swamp-like environment. he took my sister and i to busch gardens. there's a picture of me with a yellow boa constrictor draped around my neck somewhere, if memory serves
he was pretty reserved and opinionated and very bright. he never lost his faculties. i always felt like i understood him. i never felt like i had to investigate why he was so isolated for so long. when i told my dad this, he seemed surprised. he said he asked himself a lot of questions about that kind of thing
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