It is 1999. I am ten years old, and it is holiday time. I live in Maine. It’s beautiful in the winter, snowy and cold and the ocean—the ocean! It gets all misty and has what is called ice fog, a fog that only hangs over the water in the early morning from the extremely cold temperatures. It’s almost a surreal scene.
In the midst of all of this, my grandfather is dying.
I am ten years old, and the days get shorter and the nights get longer and they move him from our house, where he and my grandmother have been staying for the last year, to a hospice up the road. I make him a blanket—blanket being an old sheet that I stitch my name and ribbons onto, because I am only ten and love to sew but don’t really know how to do it all that well. I bring it to him one day, and my mom puts it on his bed. I ask my grandma, “Do you think Grandpa will be home by Christmas?” She replies, “I hope so.”
December 13th comes, and Christmas is nearing. We are making calendars with the theme of Egypt at school as Christmas presents for our parents. I go to sleep and am woken up by my mother coming into my room, gently waking me, telling me to get dressed. We have to go pick my grandmother up at the hospice, help her, bring her home. It is late, and dark, and cold, and we both cry in the car on the way.
When we get there, my mother goes to the room, but I don’t. I sit in the lounge and the nurses bring me graham crackers and hot cocoa. I watch old “I Love Lucy” reruns.
The three of us go home, and my mother calls my father, who is away on a business trip. I go upstairs and lie on my floor reading an old issue of Teen Magazine. It is four a.m. “Get some sleep,” my mother tells me. It is up to me whether or not I go to school tomorrow, and I love school. I worry, believing I should stay home with them. She tells me that it’s okay to go.
I sit with a sad look on my face in class the next day as we’re finishing our Egypt calendars. One of the girls asks me what’s wrong. “Did your grandpa die?” she asks me. “You’re a good guesser,” I say bitterly and run out of the room. I sit in the hallway for a little while, trying to process everything. There is a funeral, and we all drive down to Cape Cod, to the military cemetery where my grandfather chose to be buried. In the car I write a Eulogy of sorts and ask my mom if I can recite it. She asks me to say it, and I do, and she almost cries. She says I can recite it. I don’t write it down, and years and years from then on I don’t remember what it said, and I wished I did. But I remember it was nice.
Christmas still comes, and I am still excited, in that way that ten-year olds are. I am particularly happy about my Mulder and Scully “X-Files” action figures that I get under the tree. I give my grandmother a potholder, and she starts to cry. I ask my mother what’s wrong, and she tells me to go hug her. I happily oblige, and tell her not to cry, that it’s okay.
The morning turns into the afternoon, and I still am happily playing with my action figures, which is that year’s equivalent of playing with the box instead of the toy—among other things, I also get a pinball machine. Right now, however, I’d be content playing with my action figures all afternoon.
We’re supposed to go out for Christmas dinner at a local restaurant and eat all the yummy, wonderful things that come with the holiday season and come home after, full and tired. But there is a change. We’re going to get Chinese food. My father makes a comment about “A Christmas Story,” and I, having never seen it, don’t know what he means except in the they-play-that-on-T.V.-for-24-hours-every-year way. That movie and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I hate that movie—too sad. My mother loves it, and it would take me until I was much older to understand why. Even so, it’s still too sad.
My father drives into town to get the Chinese food, and after we all eat our fill my parents decide to take a walk. We live on a rural, snowy road across from the ocean. It is cold, and we bundle up in layers and set out down the long driveway.
It is my parents, my grandmother, my aunt, and I. It is quiet and beautiful and everything is white. We walk up the road, around the corner, and all the way to the end.
My mother and aunt start to do the “Monkees” walk, the walk from the T.V. show about the band of the same name. It’s an arms-looped walk in time with each other, and it’s funny, and we laugh.
Rounding the corner, we arrive at the top of the road. You can see all the way down it, out to the highway and the ocean, which is across the street. The sun is setting, and it casts a warm glow onto everything. It reflects on the water, and it’s beautiful.
My grandfather had a whole set of phrases that he used on a regular basis. Some of them were fill-in phrases that I took great joy in completing—my favorite always was, On the other hand….she wore a glove. He told my mother to, “Keep her powder dry.” And he didn’t like the word “goodbye.” He always preferred, “See you later.” And it really is better, because everywhere I go I still see a bit of him, and there will always be things that will always remind me of him. It is always a, “See you later.”
We head back down the road and into the house, where we all relax and warm up after the walk. Night falls, and I remember what my mother said the night we drove to pick up my grandmother. There’s a new star in the sky, she said. A new angel.
It is never a goodbye. It is always a see you later.
By Allison Novak ‘10
