Call Me Charlie

Issue 334

Dear George,

Pop-Pop died one week before your sixth birthday. You stood with me in the receiving line at the front of the funeral home and said hello to everyone who approached with a big smile on your face. You said, “Hi, I’m George! I’m going to be six in two days.” You said this with two missing bottom front teeth.

You lost your first tooth a week earlier in Charlotte. You were there with Papa and Grandma and Grandpa. It happened at the dinner table. The tooth fairy left you ten dollars because it was your first tooth. I was in New Jersey, watching my dad die. He’d been diagnosed with ALS in February. They said he had 2-5 years. We didn’t think it would happen so fast. But one day he told Grandma Jojo he wanted her to take him to the hospital because he couldn’t breathe. Things escalated quickly. A doctor told Grandma Jojo to call family members and tell them to come. “Like, right now??” she said.

We thought he was going to die that night. I booked my flight.

Early the next morning my sister drove me to the hospital. Pop-Pop was sitting up, fully alert, talking to Mom. He was surprised to see me, and surprised that my brother had come the day before. Aunt Stephanie told him that we thought he was going to die, that the doctor had told them to call family members.

“Really?!” Dad said, in only the way that he could, like the whole thing was truly wild and incredulous and fascinating. He sat up talking to us for almost five hours. I rubbed his feet and he groaned, the way he always did when anyone gave him even the inkling of a massage. I asked him what Billy Joel album he wanted to listen to, and he picked Live at Madison Square Garden. He fell asleep as it played from my phone.

The following days blurred together. Pop-Pop was in the hospital for five nights, and then the hospice center for three before he died.

I never worried about you and Layla. You were in the best possible care with Papa and your grandparents. I felt like I was in a different realm in New Jersey, only able to be present with my mom and dad and siblings.

The three of you came the day before the funeral. I had not seen you in twelve days, the longest I’ve ever gone without my kids. You lost your second tooth on the plane to New Jersey. Like really lost it. It might still be hidden somewhere on that plane. You and Papa wrote a brief note to the tooth fairy, and that night I put a five dollar bill under your pillow as you slept on the trundle bed at Grandma Jojo’s house.

On the morning of the funeral you did not want to go. You said it would be boring. Everyone was waiting on you to leave the house. No one expected you to stand with me at the front. You and Layla were with Papa, sitting in the front row, but once you saw all the people coming, and how they were waiting in line to talk to all of us, you came right up and stood with me.

I was in the middle of the line, and once Grandma Jojo saw what you were doing she laughed. “Can we move him to the front to be the greeter?” she joked. When I saw people I knew coming down the line, I said to you, “That’s Karen, she’s an old family friend.” Then Karen reached me and before she had a chance to say anything you blurted out, “Hi Karen!” and she said that you were the most adorable thing she’d ever seen.

Papa had wanted to shield you and Layla from death and funerals but I wasn’t too concerned. My Grandma died when I was in fifth grade. I wasn’t sad at the funeral. As a matter of fact my only memory is Pop-Pop and his brother hysterically laughing. They’d been crying, and had so many tissues in their hands, and they eyed each other from across the room and must have had the same thought… so many tissues, but where are the trash cans? And they completely lost it. All us kids lost it, too. My aunt had yelled at the pair of them.

Also, Pop-Pop was cremated, so there was no scary dead body in the room. Only pictures. Hundreds of pictures. We stayed up late all week making the collage boards. I recruited my high school girlfriends to help while we sat in the living room, reminiscing and laughing and drinking wine.

Mostly I wasn’t concerned about the funeral because you and Layla weren’t close with your Pop-Pop. He sat in the corner of the living room and didn’t engage too often with you. When he did, he gave you a kiss on the lips, and you ran over to me and said, “Mama, why are Pop-Pop’s kisses wet?” I just shook my head. His kisses were always wet, for my whole life.

During the service I stood at the front of the room and told a story about Pop-Pop. It was about the time Grandma Jojo and Pop-Pop came to visit when you were an infant. Pop-Pop had gone to bed while Papa, Grandma Jojo and I stayed up talking. We told her we were having a hard time. Colic, reflux, sleepless nights. Grandma Jojo nodded like she understood, but eventually she said, in so many words, that Papa and I were doing it wrong. That we were parenting wrong. Things escalated, and Papa got angry, and I didn’t know what to do. I just remember wanting the whole scene to be over and for everyone to be fine. But things weren’t fine.

The next morning, Papa told me he was still upset by what happened, but that he should never get angry like that, so he was going to apologize to Grandma Jojo. We were all in the kitchen toasting bagels for breakfast when Papa said, “Patricia, can I talk to you outside?”

Grandma Jojo said sure, and they went on the back porch and Sam shut the door.

That left me sitting at the kitchen table with Pop-Pop. It was silent for a few seconds and then he said, “So, wha’d I miss last night?”

I embarrassingly gave him the abbreviated version of the story. “It was bad,” I added. “It was just really bad.”

Then Pop-Pop looked at me, and perhaps for the first time in my life gave me advice.

“You take his side,” he said, “No matter what happens, you always take his side.”

It was a bit of a scary story to share in a room full of people, especially my mother, who I was certain would not like my story very much. But in Pop-Pop’s last week of life, I sat with him in the hospice center one day, holding his hand, and I told him I was thinking about telling this story at his funeral but that I didn’t think Mom would like it very much, so I decided I would just tell the story to him. Then I told him the story, and we both cried. As I was leaving the room, to get someone else to send in, Pop-Pop stopped me. “And you know what,” he said through that terrible mask on his face, muffling his speech, “you can go ahead and tell that story at the funeral. Doesn’t matter if Mom gets pissed.”

I ended by the telling the full room of people—so many people that they had to bring in all their extra chairs and some people still stood—I know that my dad loved all his children very much, but he loved my mom more than any person in the entire world, and I think that that is his legacy.

If Pop-Pop lived longer, another ten years even, you would be sixteen. By then he would have more of a relationship with you. He would ask you about sports and TV, and if you were still playing chess, he’d ask you about that. Maybe he would ask you about school or girls. He would want to know what music you were into. He was a big concert-goer. He and Grandma Jojo took me to my first concert in fourth grade—Billy Joel. Us kids were all promised our first concert with our parents, but I was the first to go, making it extra special because I went even before my older brother and older sister. I had loved Billy Joel immediately, blasting my Glass Houses cassette tape on repeat. My dad liked to blast music, too, which was something I inherited, and try to only do when your Papa isn’t home because he doesn’t like it so loud. After the concert, when it was nearly midnight, we waited in traffic in the parking lot, and my dad reached out the Buick window and bought me a concert T-shirt. It was extra large and fell past my shins, but I wore it to school the next day anyway, tucked into black jean shorts.

The best thing about your Pop-Pop was how funny and easy-going he was. Even in the last week of his life, when he was scared to die and not ready to go, he continuously made me laugh. Streams of doctors and nurses and professionals came into his room and spoke to him as if he was a child or they didn’t speak to him at all, looking at my mom and me or whichever one of us kids were at his bedside that hour. Finally, when we made the terrible decision to move to a hospice center, the woman who worked for hospice came in to speak to us. She was an older lady with a bright purple mohawk and big dangly cat earrings. I watched my dad’s face, hidden behind that monstrous breathing mask that pushed oxygen into his lungs so that it dried out his mouth and we couldn’t hear him speak, to get a read on him. I didn’t know how he was receiving the message from this lady who looked so unprofessional, but she told my dad that she wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. We were talking about end of life. Getting comfortable was mentioned; a morphine drip. When she left the room, I stared at my dad. What was he thinking? Did he like her? Did he hate her?

My sister, mom, and I got closer to him. We put a hand anywhere for contact—his leg, an arm, a hand. We strained to hear him over the deafening noise of the oxygen machine, but couldn’t. So we removed the mask ourselves. We had to hear what he was saying.

“She was great,” my dad said as the mask released from his face, and I could see his relief to be told the truth plainly, even as the tear streamed down from the corner of his eye. “Purple hair and all!”

—

Love you, my big 6-year-old. Happy birthday.

Love,

Mama