We Keep My Grandfather In A Box by Theresa Buchta

It is not the last time, but it is one of the times. Candy wrappers strewn by the hills of my grandfather’s feet beneath knit hospital blankets. In a few years an infection will cost him one of his toes, but that is not now. Now is one of the strokes or heart attacks, afflictions which I can never quite distinguish, though it hardly matters to me, for whom the end result is the same.   

Last night, my grandmother and sister and I found him unresponsive in his bed. We hovered in the doorway, cataloguing signs of life. When I touched the mattress, it was damp, which embarrassed and relieved me.  

We keep my grandfather in a box, black and rectangular and otherwise nondescript. After his funeral, my aunt taped on a blown-up photograph of his face. He is smiling, not quite looking at the camera. Not candid, but almost. On Christmas we looked at his place set and at each other and then we took him down from the shelf in the closet and taped an elf hat to his head. After dinner we put him in his lounging chair and gave him his slippers. We used the curses he used and made the jokes he made. We acknowledged his passing but sidestepped it. He’s just around the corner, in another room. If we could just stop talking, we’d hear him. But the talking covers the sound of silence.  

Every day, I meet the others in the hospital parking lot and we march inside the hushed linoleum halls, a Roman legion keeping mortality at bay with vending machine snacks. Not today, we say. On the nurse’s whiteboard we draw him jailbreaking, like if we can make Death laugh, it’ll show us leniency. 

In the hospital bed, he looks like he always has, though later I will inspect photographs from this period and be astonished by his frailty. Somehow, I superimposed the stalwart figure of my youth onto the man in the bed, the one who piggybacked us endlessly and crawled on the ground, humoring our games of make-believe. His laugh is the same. We wonder aloud if we’ll get back the extradited toe. No, wait, that’s a different time. 

More family arrives, jolly and laughing, because we never do parties halfway, even convalescent ones, and suddenly we are so many and too loud and we close the door before the nurses scold us. Giddiness charges the room. We dodge candy wrappers and play bullshit. We are laughing, we were always doing that. Sometimes we yelled, but less often. We watch my grandfather eat hospital fish and make the requisite joke. We are grateful for his appetite, and for the IV in his arm and the tubes up his nose. We won’t lose him today. We’ve already decided. With our laughter and loudness, we halt Death at the door. Maybe we have never stopped playing make-believe.  

My grandfather is going deaf but hasn’t lost his mind or wit, and he asks when I’m gonna publish that book already, by which he means, will I see it before I die, even though he claims he doesn’t read women writers, and we never speak about the fact that I am a woman, and a writer.  Yet what we say or think we believe isn’t always who we are and what we do, and he cuts out newspaper clippings of local writers or blurbs on books he thinks I’ll like, and interrogates me on the fickle nature of the publishing industry and drives me to bookstores and library sales. He values knowledge above all. He was a teacher too, once, specializing in what we would call STEM. He owned all the latest tech before we did, tracked the stock market and political clime, was our first call to fix a wire or a car, to build a deck or paint a house. It wasn’t a question, his care for us. It wasn’t posturing or proving something. It was easy as breathing, as living. Love was just living. 

He never got to see the book. I couldn’t write fast enough to catch up to Death. And I remember sitting in that hospital room, a few degrees removed from the others, projecting us into a future when this moment would be just a memory and we would be an egg, cracked open and yolk spilled out. I had already made a story of us. The people in that room, swallowed by laughter, twisted into a metaphor without their consent. Maybe I have never lived enough in the moment. Maybe that is how I hold onto them. 

My grandfather lives two or three years after that day. The man collected heart attacks like baseball cards, so I have a theory about that: those are years we stole. We charmed Death, after all. We donned leprechaun garb and spirited away the pot at the end of the rainbow, we trapped the Easter bunny and snatched chocolate eggs from the garden, we caught Santa Claus sneaking down the chimney with a few extra years in his knapsack. He lost his toe but it could have been his leg. He spent three months in a rehab center other people never escaped, but we came bearing books and playing cards and family gossip, racing wheelchairs down the halls until he got out.   

A few months before his death, he stopped reading. There are no more books I want to read, he said (mine wasn’t done, so I forgive him for saying so). We never factored his opinion into our Faustian deals. He’d read all the books he was going to read. He’d lived all the life he was going to live. He knew his own fate, and took it quietly, without a fuss. The priest who knew him praised him as a simple man, not in his mind but in his needs.        

The last time I saw him was the first Father’s Day of the pandemic, and I waved to him from a distance instead of hugging him goodbye. That was always a fear of mine, that if I didn’t get a chance to hug him goodbye, I’d never see him again. So much for silly superstitions. Death, probably, getting the last laugh for our audacity. COVID didn’t take him so at least we have nothing to blame but the deteriorating body of a life on the brink. He looked at me once and said, It sucks getting old, but at least he doesn’t have to live with the loss of himself.   

On that same Father’s Day, in the morning, before we all tumbled into their house on Plymouth with our too-big feet and too-loud mouths and ate too much food and went back for seconds, he texted me Bring your roommate. A euphemism for what he surely knew. When we arrived in that place of loving excess, there was a place set for her at the table. We never spoke of it, but later, in the photographs of us posing with his box, she is there too. She reminds me of him, a little bit. Stalwart and steady in the face of emotional tides, clever about fixing broken things. Presence, most of all, is a condition of love. Words are superfluous. This is why we keep him in the box. We don’t say I love him, we don’t say I miss him. Sometimes, if we are very good and very quiet, we can hear him in the other room. 

Theresa Buchta is the recipient of an MFA from Columbia University’s Fiction program and has been published by threeroomspress. She is that 21^st century cliché: a barista working on a novel.

24 February 2023