We’ll See You People Sometime

I’m sitting here with my grandfather as I write. I shaved for this because he’s about to die. Not this moment, I’m told, but soon, probably in the coming days. He keeps a glass in the cupboard for me, its harlequin-like protrusive pattern familiar in my right hand as I settle into a cushioned wooden chair for the game with him.

We’d planned to watch his Patriots play the Bills prior to the NFL season beginning, and in the intervening month the cancer his doctor had said was isolated spread throughout his body. Now he’s stubbly faced in a wife beater and diaper beneath a sheet and blanket asleep with his mouth open, oxygen tubes in his nose. The fluid bag hanging by a precarious plastic white hook above the carpet features blood intermingling with his urine, the dark beginning to overtake the light. A weaker man might be gone already, but Fred’s lifetime spent moving his legs has surely prolonged the ending. He can hear me, but his eyes remain closed. There’s a photo of him and my grandmother waving from an open Air Force airplane door framed on the wall, a tribute to his service and propensity for wearing tall socks with his shorts.

Drake Maye just lost a fumble, the type of play that would’ve normally had Fred’s hands above his head in disbelief, smashing them down on his knees before a “What’re ya gonna do, Addy?” This is what we do. Watch football and catch up during the slower sequences. The open blinds are filtering slanted rectangular light across the screen, a pink vase full of roses and lilies my grandmother arranged for him on the windowsill between piles of magazines and antiseptic cleaning solutions as the orange leaves on the trees decorate the distance.

The Patriots have now taken the lead. When they stopped being good after Tom Brady’s departure, Fred joined me, a beleaguered Jets fan, in cheering for the Bills, the man a fan of Marv Levy’s teams that lost four successive Super Bowls in the 1990s. It seems wrong on some level to root for a divisional rival, but we don’t need imaginary rules to dictate our sports fandom.

Getting back to it: Fred served in Amarillo, Texas, a place he has long referred to as the most boring place in the world, telling me the best thing to do upon arriving is immediately turn around. He also spent time in the service in Bakersfield, California, as well as northern Morocco. Afterward, he would work word third shift doing maintenance for a name state employer, volunteer as a firefighter, and become a big brother to a mentally retarded man, Raymond, a guy he’s doted on for decades. Fred retired early-ish to take my grandmother on European tours and on trips to see her family in England, weeks when he’d been unable to do his favorite things: tend to his yard and micromanage his stock portfolio.

His curly-haired, chocolate-skinned nurse, Rosa, has stopped in again to lubricate his mouth with viscous liquid from a paintbrush-like device she wipes around his gums and on his tongue, an action backgrounded by the Patriots’ first two penalties of the game. She explains what she’s doing, a process I learned during Sue’s twenty-two days in intensive care, that personal aside one I refrain from mentioning. When I arrived, my cousin Christine was here visiting and said how Fred’s mother died on October 5th, an eerie bit of numerological foreshadowing added to the visit. She also expressed her surprise that I hadn’t found a new girlfriend yet unaware that Sue still is my girlfriend and, at least based on my current mindset, may never be given the opportunity to retire.

My mother had emailed me that before leaving his bedside yesterday she told Fred I’d be by to watch the game today, yielding a surprise “Yeah” from him, like he needed a reminder about watching a football game with me, a guy he spent years calling a condo kid, the phrase a dig on my nonexistent ability to fulfill “man of the house” responsibilities throughout my teens, one he would soften when I began mowing the lawn and shoveling snow at the house Harry bought in my twenties. The Pats recover a fumble then quickly turn the ball back over, heading to halftime down three points. “We’re seeing a good game here, huh Addy?” he’d usually ask me, so I say it to him instead, subbing in a Freddie.

Fred used to take me out on his beloved canoe for a lap around the two-mile lake near his parents’ house, the lake home to an island where we’d sit while eating sandwiches and sandwich bags of chips and cookies my grandmother packed in a cooler. The spot became known as Snake Island after I’d spotted one slithering by my Diet Pepsi can, the last time this still-condo kid would dine there, too afraid of snakes to return. We shifted our outdoor hangs to the pond at his neighbor Bernie’s house, the water dotted with four massive rocks where we’d stop to take breaks from trying to spot fish and the occasional turtle swimming amongst us.

The second half has begun, the final thirty minutes of football I will ever watch with Fred, as his breathing has softened, my eyes scanning for movement beneath the blanket. It’s 2:44 and I realize he’s dead while taking his nonexistent pulse. I tell Rosa and as soon as she sees him upon entering the room she knows he’s gone. 

My uncle, my aunt, my cousin and his wife, a nurse, and even a service golden retriever led by two staffers all make appearances in the next ninety minutes, a sequence during which the Pats come back to defeat the Bills 29-26, one final win for the freshly departed. Life turns quickly, though. My cousin and I will discuss his sciatica, my uncle and I will discuss Vinny Testaverde’s time playing for the Jets, and I will discuss with the staff how I’d rather pet service goats and donkeys.

Following the game’s conclusion I’d planned to tell Fred—much like I’d told Sue in her final hours—that it was time. I re-read my last text to Sue this morning, something I do weekly, often opening it by accident: “Today is your day to transcend your consciousness & embark on your next cosmic adventure! I will miss yue [sic] every day 4 the rest of my life, but I know your energy will guide me, protect me, soothe me, & love me. Please set yourself free, bud. I love yue TIAB!!!!”

There was only one person who could consistently unnerve Fred, and that was Sue. She’d hug him aggressively and tell him she loved him as he stood like an emotionless beefeater, and when Sue supportively agreed with the irrational things he said that those closest to him had long become inured to, she was able to conjure some hidden humanity he seemed otherwise incapable of displaying when she wasn’t around, like a child embarrassed by doing something foolish that drew attention to himself. They were nothing alike yet both were unapologetically outlandish, behavior that made their sincerity so startling and somehow realer when together. The last photo Fred gave me was one he took of Sue in seasonal pajamas on Christmas day, his birthday and her favorite day, a beautifully composed shot of her smiling sitting in a recliner holding her stuffed rabbit Hildegard, the frame’s newfound melancholy now inescapable.

For once in my life, I’m (kind of) happy the Patriots won a football game. I stuffed the two uneaten mandarin oranges I brought with me inside my now empty glass to bring the vessel to its new home. I’d put a photo of my grandmother, my mother, Fred, Sue, and me eating dinner at an Italian restaurant on the fridge a few weeks ago, one where the four of us are smiling as Fred sits emotionlessly with his eyes closed. When we said goodbye in the parking lot that July night, I have no doubt Fred’s final sentence as he opened his car door was, “We’ll see you people sometime,” a phrase that should be on his tombstone, one he said as his farewell all the years I knew him. It’s funny how “sometime” will now mean autumn Sundays, the time Fred and I most enjoyed spending with one another.

See you next week, my man.