Opa

Last Friday, my grandfather died. It happened in the midst of some painful personal issues I’ve been having to deal with and, especially since there was and will be no funeral, I haven’t been able to properly mourn him. So I wanted to write about him here. He lived to be 89 and was my last surviving grandparent.

Although my parents will tell you he was already gone. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years and had so few lucid moments he really was a shell of who he had been, as harsh as that sounds.

I don’t want to write too much about what he was like in his last years. I also don’t want to write much about his unhappy childhood although I’ll mention that he was abandoned by his mother (whose ashes, at the moment, are sitting in a box on a shelf several feet to my right), raised in orphanages and never had a birthday party. His sister Hope died when she was 8. In one of the last times I recall being at his house he showed me pictures of her, called her “My Hopey” and got teary-eyed.

He was tall and skinny and could easily alternate between friendly and cold. He had trouble getting close to people. He had a wicked sense of humor and made a living as a cartoonist. He played piano too—the only other person in my family I know of who could play by ear.

I think that’s why I always felt a special connection to him. He had a piano at the house he shared with Ruth – their relationship is probably too complicated to write about here (and I probably don’t even know the half of it) but, in a nutshell, she was his landlord and close friend for as long as I can remember. They had this old dusty piano that always seemed to be slightly out of tune, and whenever he sat down to play whatever it was he was improvising, I would sit and listen and I understood. He played by ear like I could (I don’t think either of us read music very well) but he didn’t play exactly like I did. His playing was more fluid and melodic where I think mine is more percussive and chord-focused. I’ve never really liked to play melodies. But I understood what he was doing and I liked that we seemed to share this weird musical gene that nobody else in the family seemed to have.

I remember once about 10 years ago I was playing something on their piano – either something I was making up or a song I had written – and he stood over me and asked “What do you do with your left hand?” I actually wasn’t sure. I had never given it any thought.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I never know what to do with my left hand.”

“I guess I just do whatever feels right.” I didn’t even know how to explain what I didn’t know that I knew how to do. But I felt like we shared a secret language. Nobody else in my family had ever asked me what I did with my left hand.

The last time I saw him was last fall, maybe, at my aunt’s home where he had been staying. At this point he was unable to care for himself and the relationship he had with my aunt was more like child-parent than father-daughter. My aunt has a piano. She never really played by ear the way her father and I did, but she can read music and practices dutifully. So I sat at the piano playing something soft while my grandfather sat in a semi-catatonic position staring out the window.

“Try playing something more upbeat,” my aunt said. “I think he’d like that.”

So I played some kind of march—something I’d probably play in a musical improv performance if the scene was about soldiers or something. It was rigid and rhythmic and in a major key. Suddenly, my grandfather’s face brightened. He started clapping. He was smiling and singing along in words that didn’t make sense to me but I guess they did to him. My aunt pulled him up out of the chair and danced with him — as much as his rail-thin body was able to, at least. He seemed happy. I played until my fingers hurt.

Rest in peace, Opa.