Grandpa Joe

Freestyle, in the style of Kim Addonizio. The subject is my great grandfather's passing, and the bond he shared especially with my cousin Hayley and myself. Hayley and I resemble each other quite a bit, and once Alzheimer's took over, he called us both Rosie. This is one of the most special moments of my life, and I wish I could express it better somehow.


Grandpa Joe

They were gathered in a single room furthest from the nurse’s station, all collect around a man who had not uttered a coherent sentence in years. A man whose hands shook with age and dementia; who taught my sister to roll cigarettes at age seven; who always stopped my cousin and me (both tall, dark-haired ladies) to say “Rosie, you’re so beautiful.” Neither of us were Rosie, but we thanked him all the same. It had become our sad, private joke. A bond between the three of us, though only two of us remembered. But he still held court, like a decrepit king on a dilapidated throne. Some time during the slow-motion melee, Andy Joe, one of his many great grandchildren lovingly tucked his favorite teddy bear under Grandpa’s arm, enhancing the sweet agony of the final moments preceding his death. The end, much like the beginning. Bittersweet and filled with love. And surrounding so far away from the deathbed, generations chat quietly and cried softly, unsure of whether to be happy or morose. The younger ones played, as is their nature, but did so in a hushed, funereal way, as though intuition guided their young hearts. And Joe, at the end of a spectacular 89-year run, lay propped on anorexic pillows as well as the teddy, stared blankly up at the ceiling, not seeing or hearing the life surrounding him. Perhaps he had imagined this moment once in a romantic daydream, but as the machines were switched off and twenty people held their breath and each other, he exhaled, left go - the romance of life. And left us for there.