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One summer when I was about ten years old, my grandfather died. My mother’s father. He had shot himself after five years of cancer that started in his colon and steadily worked its way through his abdomen. We always just say that he died of cancer - and it's true in every sense except for the most cold and literal one. Proof that the truth sometimes is not so simple as “just the facts, ma’am.” I have no memories of my Pe-paw when he was not sick (we're Southern so forgive our artless endearments, lol). I used to spend a lot of weekends at their house though, and many days during this particular summer. Rarely did I ever see him out of bed - and that was usually only at night when he ventured out of their bedroom to watch "his shows" after my grandmother had gone to sleep. Like The Rockford Files and Columbo and The Streets of San Francisco. I would usually sit and watch with him even though these "grown-up" shows held little interest for me. We hardly ever spoke, I don't think he was particularly fond of kids, but I hang onto these times as significant nevertheless. They are the only real memories I have of being in his presence.
And then there were times that he would come out to type...with a small electric typewriter on a little rolling table. I never wondered or questioned what he was typing all that time, usually I’d be occupying myself with the huge collection of slide photographs they had taken on a trip to Europe when he was still healthy or the big plastic garbage bag of get-well cards he had collected over the years. He must have counted on my disinterest because, as it turned out, what he had been typing were voluminous amounts of suicide notes and plans for suicide that were found by the family after he died. He had been vigorously and methodically planning this final act for more than a year - developing different methods of doing it, different places, different times - complete with detailed plans and even some with sketches and diagrams. But in the end, he decided to forego all his plans and do it rather haphazardly - with a bullet to the heart in the shower of the spare bedroom. Still, it worked with one shot. From what I am told, he was always a very capable and exacting man.
I can vividly remember standing in that shower stall a couple days later and touching the large chip that was missing from the baby blue tile after the bullet had passed through his body and hit the wall. I remember it as my first shudder of surreal-ity…my first realization that we lived in a world that was strange and impermanent and, to a large extent, unknowable...that people close to me can be experiencing the ultimate despair and I don’t know it, can’t see it. It frightened me. And I remember vividly, as well, the next day standing next to his coffin in the funeral home, rubbing his arm and telling him that it was okay. Not to worry. That everything was going to be alright. And finally...crying.
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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce
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