“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” - Mary Oliver, When Death Comes
I’m not proud of how I responded to friends and neighbors when I told them Jeff’s grandfather had died. “It’s okay” I said. “It’s really not that sad.”
I told them about the bipolar disorder that plagued him for most of his life in an effort to explain how it warped his brain and personality, turning him into a shadow of who he might have been. In other words, he wasn’t the kind of grandfather a grandchild grieves. Jeff had grieved him while he was alive, grieved for the grandfather he didn’t have.
In the almost eight years I’ve known Jeff and his family, I’ve mostly gotten to know his grandfather through the stories his family tells and also the ones they don’t. That is to say, my picture of who he was is incomplete and extremely subjective.
One of my toxic traits is that I want you to love me. You could hurt me a thousand times in a thousand ways and I would probably still be trying to figure out how I could make myself better and more likable. Like a kicked dog, I will retreat long enough to lick my wounds only to come back—as loyal and trusting as ever—to try to make you love me.
But when you hurt someone I love? When you hurt someone I love, I become another beast entirely. I rise up to my full height like a mother grizzly bear, staring down at you—salivating as you shake with terror—before I eat your heart breakfast.
My love for my people is fierce, and untreated mental illness had turned Jeff’s grandfather into someone who didn’t know how not to hurt the people he wanted to love. So when he died, I wasn’t sad, and I said as much to most of the people who offered their condolences. How do you grieve a man you never really knew?
I didn’t know, so I didn’t try. It was simpler to use the label of a diagnosis to make a complicated man into something simple. I took what little I did know, and decided it was enough. He was bipolar. It wasn’t well managed. The end. Even the way I explained it was telling. He wasn’t bipolar. He had bipolar disorder.
So I was caught off guard when Jeff’s uncle stood next to his father’s casket and said “We get to choose how we remember him.” He had spoken honestly about his father’s bipolar disorder, had not attempted to hide or deny it. But he had also told the story of a perfect day when, as a boy, his dad had invited him on a day trip to the family farm and they’d spent the afternoon driving and talking and eating jelly beans with a summer breeze floating in through the windows as he basked in the sun of his father’s attention.
What I didn’t tell our friends and neighbors was that Jeff’s grandfather has been giving us prescription bottles and plastic baggies full of spare change for six years because on our wedding invitation we had shared a dream of a place in the woods where people could rest and heal. We told the friends and family we invited that we were saving our pennies to make that dream come true. We still are. When I dream, I dream of that place, windows that look out into fields of wildflowers, a wood burning stove, trails through the woods, a chapel in the trees, welcoming friends and guests to stay and find true rest through guided and personal retreats.
When we were in Cincinnati for the funeral, my mother in law gave me the last medicine bottle of change that Papa had saved for us. Jeff’s grandfather never forgot our dream, and he made sure we knew it. He believed in our dream and said without words that it was one worth chasing.
I didn’t say that when people told us how sorry they were, but I should have.
Reflect
How do you want people to remember you after you’re gone?
I so appreciate your vulnerability. Regret can be an uncomfortable topic. I'm glad you chose to share this story. I want to be remembered as someone who made people feel safe, welcomed, and loved. And I want people to remember my humor. :)
I came over here from the Substack Writers at Work office party. What a beautiful and tender essay, full of vulnerability and realness. I lost my younger brother last year, and it is a complicated grief in many ways. Thank you for putting into words something I've been feeling!