If a cow ever got the chance...

So... (and my further apologies to anyone for whom this is repeated information): my grandfather died last Saturday. Mom's dad. That's why I was in Wisconsin.

It WAS his time to go I think. He was 87 years old and had basically (as my mom said) done whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with his life. Luckily, what he wanted to do were socially uplifting things like going to Russia five or six times between 1961 and 1994 (no, I don't know how he was able to get a visa back then), visiting farmers there and helping farm-machinery dealerships get started. He had his own farm dealership in Wisconsin, from which he sold tractors and machine parts and, oddly, refrigerators and coffee makers, and it was successful enough that by the end of his life he could own four houses, in Wisconsin and Florida, and take all his children on the like Grand Tour--a summer in Europe when they each graduated. He was pretty cultured for his time and place.

He and I weren't that close, which I kind of regret, but I don't see how it could have been different. He was very masculine in that gentle, old-fashioned way that requires an ultra-feminine object. Feminissima: which unfortunately implies attractiveness and helplessness on the part of the object. Meaning that he really dominated my grandma for fifty years (the helplessness thing), telling her what she could wear, buy, how many squares of toilet paper she could take into the bathroom with her, etc. (After his stroke, she got back at him by telling everyone within range how annoying he was now, how childlike, how difficult to care for. It wasn't pleasant to watch fifty years of resentment get worked out in that way, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done the same thing in her place.) Meaning, more benignly, that he was always complimenting females everywhere, especially his children and grandchildren--calling us "sweetheart", kissing our hands, telling us how pretty we were... Which is the absolute last thing you want to hear when you are an overweight thirteen-year-old in an ill-fitting ruffly dress and have suddenly developed gig*ntic breasts [5/16/02: I'm sick of getting Googled for that] and a triangular perm and rudimentary makeup skills (bright red lipstick, blue eye shadow). I knew I was anything but pretty, so I concluded that my grandfather was either senile or making fun of me. Neither was correct--it was just a part of who he was and had been brought up to be, between the world wars. When he had his first stroke, it took away a good portion of his mind but left his personality intact. In the nursing home he continued to shower flowery compliments on the nurses and fellow patients, and they all loved him. So I guess it was just part of his personality, one of a collection of reflexes that make us recognizable to others. I wish he had treated my grandma better, but they seemed to love each other despite everything, and I think a lot of marriages were like that in the 1940s and 50s. So what do I know?

What I can't imagine is what this is like for my mom. She was always his favorite child, and the feeling was mutual. She visited him in the nursing home almost every day, and she was the one who had to had to invoke the "no extreme measures" clause when, after his second stroke, he stopped being able to swallow, pulled out the feeding tube twice (even though it wasn't clear that he knew what he was doing with that action), and shortly thereafter became completely unresponsive. It then took him the better part of a week to die of simple dehydration, and my mom was with him the whole time. (She came home twice to take a shower, but that's it.) She read large portions of the Bible aloud to him in case he could still hear it. I think she made the right decision--he would have been almost totally paralyzed, and on this unwanted feeding tube, until his heart gave out (and who knows how long that would have been since he was kind of bionic)-- but I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to decide, and then to be there. I know I'm not that strong.

That's pretty much all I have to say right now. My grandfather was a strong-willed man, a good person, and if there is a heaven anywhere, I know he's in it. (And if he isn't, then it's probably a crappy heaven filled with fundamentalists, and decent liberal-minded people wouldn't want to be there anyway.)

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