For The Grandfather I Lost
Sadly, my grandpa passed away last week.
The news wasn’t much of a surprise, as he was 85-years-old and had been in congestive heart failure for the week prior.
Even so, his death hit my family hard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more loved father, brother, uncle, and grandfather. Moreover, it would be difficult to find a man who loved his family more than he did.
I know we all eventually lose people we love. This is an inextricable part of the human experience. And we all process it differently.
So I hope you’ll indulge me as I remember the good, the bad, and the utterly hilarious times I had with my grandpa, as writing this is helping me process losing him.
Bruce Franklin Wise was a true man’s man.
He grew up on a farm in Arkansas and quickly learned to work with his hands.
He proudly served in the United States Air Force.
When he retired from active service, he worked at McClellan Air Force Base repairing military aircraft.
He could build or fix almost anything.
He built a house from the foundation up. He rebuilt a Dodge Dart which we nicknamed “the puddle jumper” because it was so small, a puddle was the biggest obstacle it could drive through. My parents drove it for years, and he kept it running before they eventually invested in a minivan.
He didn’t have much in the way of formal education, but he was incredibly intelligent. He could often figure out how something worked just by observing it for five minutes. Moreover, he could take it apart and put it back together.
Men like him are a dying breed.
There was a time I was convinced my grandpa was immortal.
If I had a dollar for every time I watched him walk away from some accident that should have killed him, I’d be having a steak from Morton’s tonight for dinner.
This is a man who survived a massive stroke that would have killed most people. Sadly, the stroke took away his ability to read, write, and speak clearly. That being said, he still found ways to crack us up, even if the words eluded him.
This is a man I watched get carried away with his new pneumatic nail gun and nail his thumb to the house he was building.
“Oh, goddammit,” he groused, more annoyed than hurt.
He then proceeded to pull the claw hammer from his tool belt and yank his thumb — nail and all! — from the side of the house. Even more gruesome, he gave his thumb a quick appraisal, shrugged, and with the same hammer, jerked out the bloody nail.
Talk about gruesome!
Did he seek medical attention?
Fuck no!
That would have been time taken away from building shit!
His idea of “first aid” was running the injured thumb under a hose, then wrapping it up with some black electrical tape.
This is a man who, while helping him build a barn, I once saw fall twenty feet through scaffolding like he was a puck in The Price is Right’s Plinko game and bounce off the concrete like he was made of rubber.
Before any of us could rush over and ask if he was ok, he popped up like nothing had happened, looked up at the broken scaffolding, and said, “Guess it needed a few more screws.”
YOU THINK?!
That only resulted in a few bumps and bruises.
I swear he could have severed one of his limbs with a circular saw, and just duct-taped it back on and kept working.
My grandpa was funny.
Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes without meaning to be.
He loved to tease my grandmother, much to our delight and her annoyance.
This is a man who would walk by someone working on a disassembled engine and would casually toss a few more nuts and bolts in the pile of parts, so when the engine was reassembled, there would be extra parts left.
We laugh about it now, but that’s because we didn’t witness the panic of a mechanic who, after seeing the extra parts, was forced to take the engine apart again to see where those extra parts belonged.
This is a man who, when he asked my sister what she wanted for her birthday, and she, being upset about something, sulkily replied, “A bag of mud!”
So, a few days later at her birthday party, my grandpa gave my sister her gift. She seemed very confused and a little upset when she unwrapped a Ziploc bag filled with mud.
This is a man who once yelled in traffic at a fellow driver who he accused of being a “cigar-faced bastard.”
We still laugh about that one.
This is a man who, when I helped him put up the framework for the barn he was building, woke me up before dawn on a Saturday morning and was surprised that I was tired.
I was seventeen-years-old and had gone up to my grandparents’ house after school on a Friday.
I was barely conscious during breakfast. It was still dark outside for fuck’s sake! He looked over at me and said, “You’re still tired?”
This wasn’t a question. It was a disapproving judgment.
When I replied that, yes, I was still very tired, he said, “Why? I let you sleep in until 5:30.”
This was a sentence that had never been said before in the entire history of spoken language.
My grandpa had boundary issues.
God love him, the man was born to meddle in everyone else’s business.
He never did so maliciously, mind you. He just liked to be involved in…well, everything.
When I was growing up, my grandparents lived within a five minute drive of our house. He would routinely show up at 7am on a weekend morning just to see what we were up to.
Sleeping, grandpa.
You know, like people do on a Saturday.
If he didn’t come in person, you better believe he’d call, sometimes as early as 6am.
We used to joke we’d have to bury him with a telephone, otherwise, he’d show up at 3am and haunt us, just to ask us what we were up to.
The stroke he had only exacerbated his lack of social filters.
That, and he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
After I was home after my accident, my grandpa would show up at our house at odd hours. He wanted so badly to help out in whatever way he could. Unfortunately, due to his own physical limitations and impaired cognition post-stroke, he mostly got in the way.
We had to take away his key to our front door.
We forgot he had a key to the back gate. He very quickly figured out he could get in through the garage if he went in through the back gate and the garage door was unlocked.
It startled the shit out of me when he’d shake me awake at the crack of dawn. We told him he couldn’t do that anymore, and to please return his gate key.
He refused. So we put a combination lock on the back gate.
My dad was out front mowing the lawn when my grandpa showed up and discovered the new lock. He yelled at my dad to put the old lock back on. When my dad refused, grandpa gave him the finger and drove off in a huff.
My dad gets a kick out that to this day.
My grandpa never forgave me for not marrying my high school girlfriend…and for not marrying anyone in his lifetime.
To be fair, when my grandpa was in high school, you married one of the five single women in your small town when you were sixteen, and that was your life.
More than that, however, he was very fond of my girlfriend at the time. After his stroke, he had speech therapy Tuesdays and Thursdays at CSU Sacramento where my girlfriend and I were also both students. So on those days, she and I would meet my grandparents in one of the on-campus cafés, grab coffee, and hang out for an hour or so before our next classes.
At least once a week, grandpa would look at the two of us, point emphatically at his wedding ring, then at us and ask, “When?” wondering when she and I would get married.
She and I eventually broke up after five years together (it’s a long, shitty story…), and he was upset with me as a result.
From then on, he would periodically ask me, “Any girls?” meaning, had I finally found a girlfriend yet, why hadn’t I found a girlfriend yet, what the fuck is wrong with me that I couldn’t find a girlfriend, and why wasn’t I married and popping out kids yet?
It was such a sticking point with him that, one day, I was driving him home after he and I had gone out for lunch, when he looked over and said, “Any girls?”
“No, Grandpa, I still don’t have girlfriend,” I replied.
In a rare instance in which his speech was crystal clear, he indignantly said, “Don’t you like pussy?”
It caught me so off-guard, I nearly drove off the fucking road.
My grandpa loved and was loved.
After his stroke, if he liked you, you were his “buddy.”
If he loved you, regardless of gender, you were his “boy.”
My mom was his boy. I was his boy. My sister was his boy. And even in his state of deteriorating health, he would do anything for his boys.
Moreover, he was excited to help. Hell, he was excited just to have you there, and post-stroke, he would express that any way he could.
Usually, it was with a resounding, “Hey, Boy!” or “Hey, Buddy!”
Sometimes it was an emphatic, “Goddammit, I love you!”
The day I was first home from the rehab hospital after my accident, we had several people over to celebrate my homecoming. Mind you, I was still in the halo vest, and the halo vest was bolted into my skull. We had been warned by the nurses to be careful moving me so the bolts didn’t pop out of my head and my still-healing neck bones get jarred loose.
My grandpa, seeing me for the first time after my accident, rushed over to give me a hug, but, seeing the contraption I was strapped and screwed into and not being sure what to do with any of that, he stopped short of hugging me. Being so excited he couldn’t contain himself, he grabbed one of the support rods of the halo and began violently shaking me by it.
My mom, aunt, and grandma all made the same “oh shit!” face and rushed over to pry him off and do their best to explain the fragile condition I was in. When realization set in, he shook his head in embarrassment, and said, “I’m sorry, boy.” He gave me a light pat on the shoulder. That gesture became his go-to until the halo came off.
If you’re still reading, thank you for allowing me to ramble on about my grandpa. I could fill an encyclopedic volume with memories of him.
The time he took me on my first fishing trip. Nights spent watching old movies in his RV. The time he had to drive me home from a track meet when I had food poisoning. And hundreds of other memorable moments.
No matter what it was, he was always there when I or anyone else needed him.
I was lucky to have him in my life and for such a long time.
I’m going to miss the shit out of him.
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