on july 7th he was going to switzerland. on july 10th he was going to die. they would kill him? he would kill him? he was going to die. he was going to go to sleep first? it was going to be harmless. 


when i saw my grandfather in late june, his green eyes somehow got lower on his face. also they were greyish. actually his whole face lost color. this didn't appear in the organ failing way, more like in the airplane way, where human colors smudge and dull out. he was inside his body like his body was an airplane, and he was no longer adjusted to where he once was, and not yet adjusted to where he was going. he was a dead man walking through his ending life. he was an alive man walking towards his beginning death. this hanging feeling was his colorlessness. 


before june, i last saw him in march. this was after his first stroke when he had more color and he grabbed my arms and cried into them. crying, he said, i'm so sorry, we never did have a relationship, did we. i sort of held him and was almost laughing through my words going oh it's okay, that's okay. even when i was little around him, i remember hoping he'd interpret any discomfort of mine as a feeling of warmth towards him, and this had never gone away. 


i hadn't seen him since that time in the hospital. he didn’t want to see me, or maybe he did want to but felt conflicted, but either way i didn’t want to see him either, or similarly, couldn't. a lot of time went by where i was kept aware of sometimes how well, but mostly how poorly, he was doing through my mom, but i did not see him. i questioned if i should feel guilty over this, but no, i decided to not, there was no pull to each other from either of us. 


in this stretch of time, his will raveled out of him. he got more and more un-willing. and whatever will he had left in him, he set on an assisted-suicide program in switzerland. there was a strong understanding among all of us that if he did not get to switzterland while he was still in sound mind and state to sign their consent papers, something very bad would happen, something worse than death could happen to him, a sort of imprisonment. 


he was grateful when my mom got him into a program and eager for the program to set a date, so that he could know it was really happening. when the date was set, july 10th, it tugged on me, and it became time for me to stand up straight, and clench or unclench my jaw, whichever i could do, and ask to see him. at the end of june i pushed my body into his apartment building, into the elevator, into his front door. 


he greeted me. he said do you want water. i said oh no i have some and i gestured at my water bottle, which i had been cradling like a baby, or like a grenade. we made some small talk but it was pointless. 

we sat in two armchairs next to each other, facing the tv, which was off, so just this void of a black screen. i asked him if he was scared. he had to confirm what i was referring to, which i clarified yes, was his own death that had been scheduled in a shared apple calendar. he was largely unsentimental. he said no not at all. he was not lying. 


in every silence that happened between us i was thinking hard about what a person in this circumstance would want to talk about. i asked him about the happiest times in his life. he told me stories about stealing boats and cars with his friends when he was young. i asked him if he had any advice he'd like to impart to me. he said you're going to do fine. then he thought a bit more, and said don't worry too much about losing money when you make it. and even when you do lose money, don't worry too much about that either, that he never did this and it worked out for him. then he said he said you have good people skills, maybe consider going into ai, training it or something. he doesn't know me super well, but not because he never wanted to. 


then he said lola it's very interesting to talk to you one on one. we rarely did this, us alone. he said that when i am with the rest of the family i go quiet and it looks like im having no thoughts and that he was surprised to realize that the whole time, at all those dinner tables, i was having many thoughts. you weren't saying them, he said. i said something like i tend to do this with my family and i can't help it, i don't know if it's good or bad about me. he shrugged. he said well it's just the way you are. it was so kind that he said this to me. he was so kind to say all of this to me and he wasn’t even trying to be kind. i remember thinking that. 


there was no protocol or past experience to pull from for ending our conversation but i could tell after an hour he wanted it over with. so i said, well.....,  and then i said, i'd like to see you again before your flight, and we were both aware of this euphemism i was using, "flight." but he said, oh, no, i don't think so, i don't think that will happen. 


so i figured it was time to really look at his face. i looked at his nose, the way it related to his mouth. i saw my mom in his face and i was thinking, i will miss seeing the people who gave my mom her features walking around in the world. there can never ever be enough evidence of a person you love. i will miss seeing my grandfather so animated, so vivid and up close. 


i hugged him crying. he was not crying. i said i love you. in response to my i love you, there was a pause, and then he said, oh yes that's right, love you too. and then my body, reciprocating the discipline with which i had pushed it into the room, walked me out of it. i heard the door close behind me. 


a week or so later my mom and my grandfather and a caretaker got to switzterland via a precarious set of logistics that kept falling apart but each time not completely. another way to explain is that they got to switzerland by the grace of god. 


once they were in switzerland, my mom didn't text me much, but on july 9th she texted that their appointment was the next day, and that my grandfather will probably be gone by 1am my time. 


on this night, liv and shubhra are in the living room, and lucian is visiting, and we are all talking, them on the couch, me listening on the carpet. i am aware the time is creeping towards midnight, and i'm aware that once it reaches midnight, it's only minutes until my grandfather turns on some sort of contraption full of drugs on the other side of the world and closes his eyes and dies. this concept is hard to hold and so i'm not really holding it. i'm just wanting to stay in the living room half-talking but an awareness comes over me that i'm about to cry, and that i'll have to give attention to this. my emotion is sitting there like laundry. i put it off until i can't and then i reluctantly get up from the carpet. i go outside and sit alone on the little bench by the door. 


in front of me there is the beach towel hanging over the balcony railing.
there is the moonlight on it. there is the wide moon that sees everything. there is the oxygen that can and does carry anything on it. there is my grandfather in the same world as me, and so the world has in it our oxygen, and our together oxygen is on the breeze probably, eventually, inevitably. and now i am crying. because the breeze is lifting the corners of the beach towel over the balcony. the palm tree is shining. and it is the most beautiful thing i feel i'll ever see, for no reason other than because it's what i'm seeing. every where i look becomes wider and stiller. 


i don't know what time it is, or what is going on with my family across the world, how much time he has left. so i am saying his name over in my mouth and my hands are on my heart, then cupped in front of my mouth, then in between my eyebrows. and i'm praying that it's all easy, very easy. i focus on that full and moving feeling before the cry gets born. i place my self inside of it. i fold my entire self into my heart. 


at some point i look up again, and there are no stars out, so my eyes go into the nothing sky without a focus, and in the nothing sky i see an even greater wideness which is life, life as wide as the moon, as the breeze on the beach towel, as my seeing in my eyes. i am going to cry forever about everything and suddenly i'm fine. i am done crying, it's somehow completed, without even a finale, not a big sob or a sigh, nothing. 


i wipe my crying from my face and i go back inside. i note for no reason at all the time on the microwave, it's 12:35am. i say nothing to shubhra or liv or lucian about anything, i talk but i say nothing, and they talk too, and more, and i hang around a little, and then i sleep. 

 
the next morning i wake to a text my mom had sent later the night before, that my grandfather had died at what was for me, last night, at 12:32am. 


so i know i didn't watch my grandfather die but i do know that i watched him go. he was walking into a quiet room with that recliner chair and contraption and i was getting up off the carpet and walking outside. he was saying his goodbyes and i was crying so much. then his heart stopped in switzterland, 12:32am, and we were, at the same time, seeing a sky go wide. me observing a massive space, him swirling into it. and not long after that was that very sudden, shockingly neutral okay-ness. 


my grandfather is a different person now that he's dead. he's defenseless now, which he has never been, he was always only defensive. so it's strange. i imagine him reading this and being surprised he meant anything to me at all. i don't think he considered himself to be someone who was important to me, i keep thinking about what he said to me in the hospital about our non-relationship. 


i wish i hadn't consoled him the way i did and disagreed with him instead. i wish i said, i disagree grandpa ken, because what constitutes a relationship is having vivid and complex memories of some one. so yes we did always have one, and yes it was meaningful. my grandfather was a difficult and sometimes scary person to disagree with, but i wish i did it anyway. he probably would have respected me for it. but he wouldn't have let me disagree with him without me presenting the facts and examples of why. so i will write them now:

1. my grandfather was my mother's father. my grandfather was my grandmother's ex-husband. 


2. my grandfather and my grandmother, though divorced and living separately, died within months of the other, my grandfather immediately declining in health and in will to live after my grandmother passed. 


3. my grandfather would pick me up when i was little and try to give me kisses on the cheek which i never liked. my mom would try to intervene saying something like lola only wants hugs. i remember the wetness on my face that happened regardless. 


4. my grandfather was good with cars, choosing cars, buying cars, and having information about car-related decisions. his tact with car salesmen saved my family a lot of money many different times.


5. my grandfather helped me learn to drive but after two lessons with him i had to stop.


6. my grandfather said something when i was 16. when i told shubhra what he said, and she was the first person i told, and i didn't even realize i was going to tell her until i was, she gasped and buried her head in my knees. 


7. my grandfather could be so mean and wrong. so so mean, so wrong. 


8. my grandfather would buy unique fruits at the grocery stores downtown and bring them to family gatherings. he was reliably very gracious about bringing us fruit.


9. my grandfather was strategic and intelligent and often thought that anything should be possible. 


10. my grandfather always felt more to me like a man than my grandfather. 


11. my grandfather had green-eyes and was left-handed.

these are my vivid and complex memories of him, so of course we had a relationship. although now i realize that the technicality of our having or not having a relationship isn't what he was crying over when he burst into tears in the hospital. not actually, not completely. he wasn’t wondering about semantics he was wondering about love. if it was really real. if it was there for him within the people around him. if he could have it. 


my grandfather and i, neither of us were able to understand that i loved him within the time that our lives overlapped. that’s okay because it's hard to understand something like this. relationships exist with reasons, histories, and facts, which we can use as proof to recognize the relationship itself. but love can exist with none of any of that, and this makes love much harder to verify. love is one of those things where the amount of it is irrelevant and impossible, love at even its most minimum value is vast, immeasurable, and still expanding, love, an irrational number. 


so love was always there for him and inside of him regardless of who understood or acknowledged it. i know this solely because of graciously irrational facts. how did i get pulled me out of the living room and into that silent night in july when i did, why did all that time and space between us collapse into one with no planning at all, why am i left handed like he was, why do i have green eyes like he did, that had to be love, yes, that was love, and that was love also, and that was love too.