Dia de los Muertos

Yeah, so I actually missed the last day of the blog hop. Things came up, and I had everyone else’s posts scheduled, but never got around to mine.

This is my remembrance.

It’s been nearly two years ago that Grandpa passed. That was the worst time of my life. I had lost other people before, but it was always just a call and then a funeral. It was already over and done, no stress, just sadness. For Grandpa, we lived in the waiting room outside the ICU for a week, even though I think he was gone before we even got to the hospital. In a way, I wish they had just let him go.

The worst part was that I was only just getting to know him. I’m not sure why I’d never bothered before. As a small child, I found him sort of intimidating. He didn’t talk much. He was a doer. We didn’t have much in common until I developed an interest in building things and in fixing the inevitable problems that cropped up with my Doom Jeep. He was unspeakably cool, and apparently always had been. As a teenager, he welded a machete onto a set of brass knuckles, just because he could. He built and raced cars, just like in Grease. We have pictures of him in his leather jacket with his slicked-back hair. He could fix anything. My mom’s first television spent most of its life with a pull-chain after the power switch broke. He even taught himself computers, when most of the rest of his generation was content to stare at them with thinly-veiled suspicion. He was especially fond of those goofy screamer emails that encourage you to watch the screen closely and then pop up with something gruesome and loud. I miss getting those from him. He had subscriptions to every possible e-card service, and we got dozens of them each year, at least five per holiday.

I still Skype him sometimes. I want him back.

I guess the tradeoff is that my guardian angel now has a machete welded to brass knuckles. I feel pretty safe.

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