Not Broken, Just Bent.

Today is Flag Day. It's also my grandfather's birthday.
He died when I was three. Larynx cancer that led to tounge, lung and liver cancer, brought about from decades of smoking.

It's no small wonder that I refuse to even entertain the thought of smoking anything, except perhaps my bacon. You laugh. It's no secret that my darling love participates in activities that lean toward the burning and inhaling, and that's fine. I wish he wouldn't, but he's a big boy and it's his choice.

Over the years, many such products have been offered to me personally, and via the media. The closest I allow myself to get is to stand downwind of a person smoking cloves and enjoy the scent.
Watching an old man in the process of drowning to death in his own fluids has had a profound effect on the young me, it appears.

***

By all accounts, my grandfather was a hard, unforgiving, mean drunk.
My mother does not talk about him. My grandmother does not talk about him except in those hushed ways that the emotionally abused talk of their long dead abusers. "Oh No! I can't put wall to wall carpeting in the house! Your grandfather put in that crown molding!" "Oh No! I can't take down those pine trees that are threatening to fall on the house, you grandfather planted them!"
As if he's going to materialize and berate her for putting in new carpets.

I'm not particularly fond of my Grandmother for the abuse that she's put my mother through, but if you listen closely, you can start to the the patterns. In the speach, in the mannerisms. I can see how they've flowed down through my grandmother, into my mother, and to a certian extent into me.
The difference is that I'm aware of this, and try to keep it at bay.

There are very few pictures of my grandfather. For the most part to me he remains an enigma - part WWII vet, standing proudly among his planes (picture #1,) part doting Grandfather, holding me in my easter dress (Picture #2,) and part malevolent shadow, never talked about, only elluded to.


On the service holidays (Memorial day, Flag Day, 4th of July,) I wish I could talk to him about his service in the "Great War." Mostly out of a desire to have a concrete conection to history. But I won't, and never will.

Part of me is sad that me and my family have lost that, but a different part of me is ok never having really known him.
I don't think I would have liked him much.



One way or another, Happy Birthday, Father of my Mother.
May you have found the peace in death that it appears you couldn't find in life.

- k.