remembering Grandpa

I slouched in my chair at the very last staff meeting of the year, fighting off torpor, when my phone beeped. My wife, I thought. Probably wondering why I'm not home yet. I can ignore it until we're out of here. Thirty seconds passed, and it beeped again. "The second beep is trouble," I said to a neighboring teacher, collecting my gear and stepping out into the hall.

It was Mom. She was crying.

Victor Anderson, my grandfather, succumbed to a broken-down heart on Tuesday afternoon, sitting in his truck after an appointment with his cardiologist. His keys were in his lap. He must have gone quickly and with little struggle or pain.

He had been suffering from various health problems over the past few years, always reticent to visit the doctor, dragged there at my parents' insistence. Yet for only a little over a week had we known of his latest diagnosis. Three simple words: "congestive heart failure." He was given days to months, and lasted days.

My brother writes, "My grandfather was a caring, yet often stubborn old man. He was the only member of my father's side of the family that I ever knew, and I will miss him." Like my brother, I knew Grandpa best of all my grandparents, and his loss is especially painful.

Grandpa--for he was always Grandpa, not Victor or Vic or Grandad or Pa-Pa--was genial with a charming touch of the curmudgeon--in short, a model patriarch. He must have marveled at his progeny; we are deep, intellectual types, teachers, preachers, writers, musicians. Grandpa was a tradesman, a craftsman, a tinkerer.

More important, he was a survivor. He outlasted polio long before polio's cure, though it cost him the use of his left arm. He lived alone for decades after his wife's passing. He steadfastly resisted a life of dependence on others, and in the end, it was both his strength and his undoing.

His name, appropriately, was Victor. He is my namesake, for I am James Victor Anderson.

All of my memories of Grandpa are fond. As a child, I was delighted by his generosity with apple fritters, the hallmark of his visits. His skill with a hammer and saw, especially impressive for a man with one working hand. His stories of life on the farm, the Depression, the hard years in Colorado and Kansas. And his wide, wide smile.

I have seen him lying in the funeral home, dressed in his favorite denim shirt and khaki pants, a confident, peaceful look on his face. He was a handsome man with a strong chin and warm eyes. They are closed now, yet they flicker and flame in my memory, and their warmth is in my tears.

Rest in peace, Grandpa.

Victor Anderson
1920-2005