Grandfather Loves Me Still

My grandfather died on the last day of April, eight years ago.

I’ve told this story so many times. He was the nice grandfather, the internist who lived in Maryland, not the gruff attorney from Columbus who drank terrible coffee. Grandpa might have been the only person in the world to love me for what I actually was instead of what I was supposed to be. He took interest in the things I did and valued the things I liked. When I got overwhelmed and had meltdowns at the chaotic family reunions, he took me for walks in the woods in quiet to calm down. When I visited him at the house in Maryland, we’d go to the city park together to feed the ducks. He was a lapsed Catholic instead of a fanatic, so maybe he’d even like me now.

The thing he valued most in the world, besides his grandchildren, was his garden. He had a giant garden with an orchard and a grape alley on a triple lot that I thought was a real farm. The day he had his fatal injury, he was coming in from a long day of gardening, and fell down the stairs.

I was the only relative who couldn’t go see him in the hospital. I didn’t have a car, and my mother’s sisters wouldn’t have stopped to pick me up on the way to Maryland even if I’d been safe accepting a ride from them. My great aunt kindly kept me updated with photos and news from the hospital– the news was bad, and the photos made me sick. My mother-in-law cruelly saw fit to inform me “A man hit his head in Walmart the other day and bled out in fifteen minutes,” and didn’t understand why I had a panic attack and cried for hours. I can’t even describe the grief of watching the only person who’s ever bothered to understand you slipping away from a distance, surrounded by people who can’t understand. It’s the loneliest grief there could ever be.

He lasted about ten days, regaining consciousness briefly toward the end. My great aunt says he smiled when she said my name, and showed him a video of three-year-old Adrienne reading a board book.

The day he died, I was walking Adrienne to the playground past a house in a bad part of town. An older man sitting on his porch took a look at Adrienne and flagged us down.. “I’ve got toys! Boy toys, girl’s toys, clothes and shoes. Got ’em bagged up for the trash. You can have ’em!”

It’s not wise to look up when strangers in LaBelle call to you from porches, but I was so delirious with grief and anxiety that I wandered over to talk with him. There were piles of toys raked out of his son’s room, toys his son didn’t want anymore, ready to be bagged for the trash, and he let me go through them. I called Michael to come help me take the treasure home–  two garbage bags full, all of Adrienne’s favorite things. Mega blocks. Fire trucks and ambulances. Hot Wheels. Toy groceries and a plastic shopping basket. Sidewalk chalk, crayons, brand new sneakers, jeans, bowling pins, rain boots and snow boots, Hello Kitty dolls, My Little Ponies, Batman pajamas and a musclebound Spider-Man costume. I think she still has some of those toys in the mess in her room. It wasn’t just a pile of garbage, it happened to be a pile of the very toys she liked the best.

After dropping the toys at home, we went back to the park and played on the swings.

I didn’t notice the missed call from my great aunt until we got home.

And then we found the text. “Your grandfather passed this afternoon. He always loved you very much.”

I felt a shock of vertigo, at seeing his love for me spoken of in the past tense.

And to this day, if you ask me if I believe in ghosts, and if you ask me if I believe in the Communion of Saints, I’ll give you the same answer: yes. They are the same. They are the spirits of the dead reaching down to the people still on earth. They don’t love you in the past tense, they love you still. And I will tell you the story about the kindly stranger and the pile of perfect toys on the porch the very moment my grandfather’s soul left the body. Grandpa liked people for who they were. He cared what children really wanted.

This year was a rough winter. We still don’t have the car fixed and I’ve felt frantic. I haven’t been able to go back to church attendance, the panic attacks being what they are, and I don’t know if I ever will. Adrienne has become an adolescent and watches Twitch streams in her room every spare moment instead of enchanting me by making up beautiful fantasies with her toys, and I feel as if I’ve lost her. Money’s been so tight, the only supplies I’ve managed to horde for my garden are the seed potatoes sprouting on the windowsill. I felt hopeless.  As we approached the death anniversary, I’ve felt more grief for him than I have in so long.

A few days before the end of the month, the lady in charge of the community garden messaged me to ask if I’d like to take three beds this year, and if I’d like to help get things ready for planting. She had a compost hopper and several rolls of gardener’s cloth to drop off, was I available this afternoon?

Yes, oh yes, I was available.

In another minute I was down at the garden in my jeans and most worn-out shoes, pushing the red wheelbarrow.

Adrienne was with me, carrying the shovel. “I guess you’re going to enslave me for this all summer?” she asked cheerfully.

“Absolutely,” I said.

The lady who just moved in down the street was there in her gardening apron. The lady who runs the garden was there with two children: a preschooler in a flowered dress, and a toddler whose sweatpants kept falling down. She had also brought a box containing a no-t00l-assembly compost hopper, and a great big stack of bolts of gardening cloth. Treasure. Last year the pokeweed was taller than I am, but this year it won’t stand a chance.

We chatted as we began ripping out last year’s growth from the raised beds. The deacon who planted so many lovely things last year was going to be out of town for much of the summer, and the pastor’s wife who helped last year had a garden to tend to downtown, so we would split most of the beds between each other. Three for me, three for her, two extra for anyone who showed up.

And as for the weedy patch at the back of the garden,  we could do what we liked. Not only that, but they had a generous grant from the City, so if I had ideas I could go to the garden center with them and the grant money and just buy things.

The budget the lady quoted was immense, by my standards.

I’d been planning on filling up the back of the garden with things I could afford myself. A pack of sunflower seeds isn’t expensive. Neither are a few plastic bird feeders. But the other things I daydreamed about were far beyond my price range. Now they were in reach– for me to use, but for the benefit of the whole neighborhood. Raspberry canes. A dwarf fruit tree. A bird bath. A trellis of grapes. Maybe a tiny koi pond. Anything I liked.

Adrienne and I sat in the mulch, putting together that compost hopper with the poorly translated instructions and the million tiny bolts, as we planned out the perfect garden.

I am so exhausted these days, most of the time, if you asked me what I believed in, I couldn’t tell you.

But if you ask me if I believed in the Communion of Saints, I would say “yes.”

One of them is a doctor and a gardener, the only person who’s bothered to understand me.

He doesn’t love me in the past tense. He loves me still.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.