Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

My family spent every Christmas Eve at my grandparents' house until it became just my grandma's house. This is the seventh one without my grandpa but it still feels like there's a big empty hollow at the center of the festivities without him, because he loved Christmas so much. He loved having all of us there. I can still see him handing out the presents from under the tree, feigning surprise that we were good enough to get any presents. I can hear his voice, feel his hugs. He was such a big presence.

He had a long full life and died an old man's death: stubborn and resenting hospitals to the last (he was definitely a handful for the staff!) in his 80s. But I miss him a lot and Christmas still doesn't seem right without him -- to almost the same extent that it'll always feel wrong without my brother, who I had much more reason to expect to be spending more Christmases with.

The two losses feel very close together somehow, even though Grandpa's is as far away now as Chris's was when Grandpa died.

Today again my grandma mentioned the Vikings sweatsuit of Grandpa's that Chris always slept in when he and I stayed over (something we loved to do and which I still get homesick for). She gave it to me after Grandpa died, and I think of both of them when I see it.

I told Andrew just now of the year Grandpa and I looked at photo albums of bis childhood and mine. I remember him saying "I really miss Chris," something no one else in my family has ever said in my company -- I can read it all over my parents' faces of course, but only Grandpa said it out loud. Turns out I wrote about it at the time, and I'm glad I did. It turned out to have been my grandpa's last Christmas.

Grandma was on nostalgic form too today: talking about lefse and lutefisk, gatherings with her siblings for oyster stew at New Year's, actually going places in a sleigh pulled by a team of horses as a kid because she lived in the country and the roads would never be plowed, she talked to Andrew about how she doesn't like going on my family's traditional vacation because it -- the only thing my grandpa got as excited about as he did about Christmas Eve -- doesn't feel the same without him. And I agree with her there: it too still feels like he's just stepped out of the room, or he's down by the lake messing with his boat motor, and to not have him there with us stings.

We usually call it Heck of a Game or Hate Your Neighbor (which I think is actually a different card game?) but I still distinctly remember my grandpa telling the story of the old woman he and my grandma learned this card game from, which became a staple among my family many years ago.

"She was a very religious old woman," my grandpa always said. "I never heard her curse or use strong language in her life. She never did. Except when she was talking about this game, and she said it was called 'Oh, Hell!' " I remember seeing that title written down in my grandma's old-lady handwriting, back when we needed the rules written down, and again it struck me for being so incongruous.

My family hasn't used this title much since; like I say it's morphed into those other, watered-down ones -- my family are pretty conservative too, really, and rarely or never swear -- but I still think "Oh, Hell!" is the most indicative of what it's like to play it.

We haven't played it as much in the last few years as we used to. People got sick of it; it was a little too complicated for my grandpa once the dementia finally sunk its fangs in; we picked up a new game or two. So maybe that's another reason it particularly made me think of my grandpa, and miss him, tonight.

And if tonight I pounded the table harder than I meant to, shouted and teased people louder than I meant to, maybe it was in subconscious tribute to him, because I remember with such fondness how he used to do those things.

He loved his family fiercely and showed affection more readily than anyone else I'm related to, but none of that kept him from cursing us six ways to Sunday when we were playing cards. He was so much fun; I was always so glad he was my grandpa.

I miss him like hell.

I don't remember the last time I cried so hard, for no apparent reason. "Delayed mourning for a lot of things," a friend told me, which I knew, but it didn't really seem like an explanation.

It was the day we had to sort out the plane tickets for Christmas, first thing in the morniing. I was very careful -- this is something that often induces panic attacks in me; the terrifying expense and the huge importance of everything going right just pulls the rug out from under me every time I think about it -- but by the time it was all sorted I still felt like I'd been punched in the head. I stayed in bed a long time that morning, and when I got out, I was crying. Tears streamed down my face as I went to the kitchen to try to find something to eat; sobs tore up the silence as I went to blow my nose. Sometimes the crying folded me in half, curled me up like a bug shrinking from the touch of your finger, but mostly I was still able to go around the house and do things in what was left of that morning.

And yes, delayed mourning, yes the comedown of an outwardly-simplistic but inwardly-demanding act of sorting out the plane tickets (I make Andrew do most of it but it's still hard on me), yes yes, but I couldn't get past the feeling that the usually happy (or at least relief-filled; it's been a while since I could say I had a happy Christmas) thoughts of home and family and Christmas were making me cry.

"I miss my family," I told Andrew when I finally confessed the crying. He reminded me that I'd see them soon, that we had the tickets now to prove it.

"Not all of them," I wanted to say. But instead I said "I know." I knew what he meant, and I knew he meant well. But not only is the prospect of a Christmas Eve without my grandpa simply horrific, I was missing my brother that day, more than I have in a long, long time.

At the funeral and stuff for my grandpa, my mom had a really hard time. Of course she was mourning her dad, but she kept saying all this reminded her of Chris, and even though it was almost seven years ago now, it is the last time we had a funeral in our close family -- one of those where you pick out the casket and the pictures for the little video and turn up early before the deluge of well-wishers. At the time it didn't faze me at all -- I remember that stuff hardly or not at all; there's about six months there, including my own wedding, of which I have only the fuzziest and incomplete memories -- buut what else could it be, leaving me think of my brother all the time now? What else is making me cry and stealing my words so no one even knows I'm thinking this?

Who knows?

As everyone, including the excellent Bill of Mourner's Rights says, "grief is a process, not an event."

It's easy to make time for it and to get help from close people when it's fresh and new, but it never really goes away; it just lessens and we stop talking about it.

"There is a tradition in Minnesota..." the pastor started, when the Bible readings had been done, and I knew I was going to like this guy. He was talking about going "up north," of course, to "the cabin," by "the lake," and going fishing, which is something my grandpa always loved.

He talked about the slightly spiritual element of fishing, and was more like something from Garrison Keillor than the Eddie-Izzard vicar shoehorning in "and that reminds me rather of our Lord Jesus!" to the litany of lipstick colors from a magazine found in a hedge. And when he moved on to other things, like making things out of wood, he said that even though this is a solitary hobby, he made things mostly to give to his family, and that he wasn't really alone because the person he was making it for was with him while he was doing it.

This probably made me cry more than any other particular thing, because one of my dearest childhood memories is of Christmas Eve when I was about seven, and there was a box under the tree that seemed about as big as I was. Of course my brother and I were at an age where the size of a present was directly related to how good it was, and we ran right to it to see who it was for. I was stunned to see my name on the tag; I had no idea what could be in such a big box, but I was still so excited about it that I couldn't take a nap that afternoon (I remember lying on my grandparents' bed, just a few feet from the Christmas tree and thus the box, just lying awake as if I were having some kind of spiritual experience with it myself).

It turned out to be a dollhouse, that my grandpa had made for me. My grandma bought dolls and furniture for it, and even crocheted a little bathroom mat, so her skills helped create it too. It was a marvelous thing, and I'm not sure I'll ever get a better Christmas present. I don't know if he had a pattern for it -- he often made up his own, getting ideas from things he saw in stores and wasn't going to pay money for -- but I know it was the first of several he went on to make. And while later ones were perhaps fancier (I have seen pictures of an adorable Tudor-style one) or perhaps more skillfully made with practice, mine was the first. So I'm sure he was thinking of me when he made it, and I was grateful to have been given that perspective yesterday.

It's hard to believe he isn't "here" any more, partly because, for all he was old and ill, it was a shock to lose him...but partly because he had such a strong and vivid personality that I can well imagine how he'd talk about the Twins game I watched on TV last night, or the behavior of his daughters yesterday, or the weather... but also because this house is full of stuff he made, some of it having been here so long that I don't even notice or think of it as such. It is wonderful that he could make these things and share them, because in them he is still here and still making my life better.

My grandpa is in intensive care. They don’t know what’s wrong; the doctors can’t make his bleeding stop. He’s had four pints’ worth of blood transfusions.

He’s old, yes, he’s 81 or 82. He’s been ill for a while, including a heart attack or something that required surgery a few years ago. (Since then he’s been on some kind of blood thinning medication, which of course is worsening the problems he’s having now.) Still, this is never good.

We’ve been losing him by inches for years thanks to dementia which has been much slower-moving than expected, but still making its presence known increasingly as time goes by. Yet this is another thing; this is what makes my heart drop into my stomach when I’m on the phone and start to think about whether or not I can afford a plane ticket...

Times like this are the worst to be so far away. I know I couldn’t miraculously fix everything but I could at least let him hear my voice; I could give my mom a hug (not to mention my mere presence giving her something to be a bit more cheerful about).

Walking to work the next morning I got a bit teary... not even so much for an old frail man in a hospital gown as much for things already lost to the real world, already existing only in my memories: always running the motor on the little boat when we go fishing, the big deal he makes of Christmas Eve pretending to be Santa and handing out the presents under the tree every year, cooking hot dogs and hamburgers on the little grill in his backyard, watching him play wrestle with my brother, listening to him mutter and swear over the Twins games on the radio (to this day the voice of John Gordon, the Twins’ radio announcer, makes me think of my grandpa).

All good people (and like the rest of us he’s only good sometimes) leave trails like this behind them: often mundane things made sweet by fond remembrance, things that Joni Mitchell’s right about; we almost never know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Yeah, well I know. And it damn well better not be gone just yet.