A Memory

This is yet another random memory that I feel the need to record and share. I just realized a moment ago that it will soon be one year since my Grandfather passed away. Already being a little down due to a paper that must be written before tomorrow, and considering that it is now February, this seems apropos.

Junior year was a horrible year. Over Christmas break, not long after returning from Chicago, I got a laptop and took it with me to school. The CD drive did not work, so I took it to the nearest Best Buy in Little Rock. Then the next-nearest one, as they repeatedly told me that there was nothing wrong with the non-functioning equipment. On one trip, they finally took it and mailed it to the manufacturer to be repaired. I got the fateful call to pick it up some time later, and in the parking lot of Best Buy I got a call from my sister, saying nothing more than that I "need to call Mom and Dad." Mom told me that Grandaddy had died after a relatively short morphine-coma, and I was shocked.

I had driven up to see him, presumably for the last time, a week before and Mamaw was happy that Grandaddy seemed to feel better when I was there. He had even eaten a whole small steak that she had gotten him as a Valentine's Day treat. He was doing better, I repeated! He was eating and doing better! But suddenly he was gone.

I drove through the city without paying attention to what roads I turned onto and wound up in the parking lot of a very pretty, small church. I walked around it and looked at its stained glass, then found a bush of decorative sawgrass. The week before, one of the last things my father and I did for Grandaddy was to cut down his sawgrass. Breaking off one of the bushy heads, I set it down in the car and drove away.

Even before the funeral, my family was rubbed raw and dangerously close to completely disintegrating. Uncles almost came to blows and people were already getting anxious over who was going to get the truck. My uncle left my aunt. My aunt died. We couldn't talk about my sister's marriage with her anymore. We buried the best man I've known.

I got back to school and my laptop was soon stolen, after all those trips to Little Rock just to get the freaking thing in working order for a stranger to look up porn on it. My sister did get divorced. My uncles stopped talking to each other and one practically disappeared after his drug use was discovered. I broke up with my girlfriend because I was tired of her having to be with someone she resented.

And when I unpacked after driving home at the end of that semester, I found the bushy head of the sawgrass in my floorboard under a bag, rubbed raw until completely disintegrated.

Oh, things were dark then.

There is hope, please remind me.

There is hope.