I’ve been thinking a lot about my Grandfather lately.

I actually have 3 living grandparents, my two grandfathers and my paternal grandmother. En famille, I usually distinguish between the two grandfathers by referring to one as “crazy” and the other as “mean”. The story of the mean grandfather will wait for another day. Today, I want to talk about my crazy grandfather.

My crazy grandfather is married to my Nanna, also crazy. They live by themselves in a trailer in southwestern Pennsylvania. They are somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 years old. They probably shouldn’t continue to live alone, but, as I believe I have pointed out, they are crazy.

As a child, I called him Pap-Pap but my grown-up self calls him what my dad, his son, calls him: Pap.

When I was a baby, I apparently worshipped him. My baby book claims that my first words were Pap-Pap--he was so proud of that!-- and goes on to say that he used to let me lick the foam off of his beer. That I remember—he let me do it till I was old enough to retain it (and till I was old enough to get him in trouble for it). He also took me and my brother with him to the VFW bar any time we wanted to go—they had this bowling machine there that we loved to play! It was 10 frames of duckpins for a dime! Pap kept his change in one of those plastic squeezy cases—you now the ones? In any case, he always kept it full of dimes.

He also used to sing to me, taking great pleasure in my indignation when he got the lyrics wrong. His favorite song to sing? Rudolph the Green-Nosed Bulldog. Man, I hated that song!

When we tired of the duckpin bowling—and the singing--we could play with the tire he hung from a tree in his backyard. I loved that tire. I used to swing so far out that it felt like I was flying. It was the best feeling. Except for the day that I discovered locusts on the trunk of the tree. That was a bad day. :)

When we got older, he built a swimming pool in the back yard for us. This was in response to my mean grandfather putting in a pool. He didn’t want us to have to go to the mean grandfathers just to swim. What he didn’t seem to grasp is that we wouldn’t have gone to the mean grandfathers, anyway. But, it was a lovely gesture.

Pap wasn’t a church-going man but every Sunday, he would peel the potatoes for Sunday dinner and set them on to boil. He always put on a big stack of 45s to listen to while he was doing it-- Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis—that sort of thing. I don’t recall ever seeing him buy a new record. He wasn’t a man who embraced change. He liked what he liked.

There were also many things that he didn’t like: he didn’t like hippies or drugs or republicans or minorities very much. He was a bigot, in the truest sense of the word. He felt that there was some sort of white entitlement in this world and he was hurt and offended in later years that the world didn’t seem to see it that way anymore. Now, mind—he was never a violent man. He didn’t wear a sheet or drag people into the woods for lynching. His was a quiet bigotry, a calm disappointment in the way the world turned out. I don’t kid myself that his bigotry is mitigated by his pacifism, but he was a old man long before I got my ethics all up in his face and, really, there was no changing him. And, ultimately, he was my Pap-Pap.

I find it interesting that to a young me, he was a huge, hulking beast of a man. In reality, I guess he was quite mortal in size. Maybe 5’10”, 165 lbs. Today, he might go 130, wet and carrying the cat.

And now he’s sick.

He’s been sick, really, in one manner or another for a really long time. He has black lung from too many years in Pennsylvania coal mines. He has a heart condition. He has diabetes. He has a bleeding ulcer. He has hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, a condition that went undiagnosed for so long that he has permanent brain damage and nerve damage in his legs. He is in pretty constant discomfort. He is still cantankerous, but his rantings lack spirit. Heck, he lacks spirit.

And now they think that they see a mass in his lung.

There was surgery last week and a biopsy will follow. If it’s cancer, and the doctors seem to think that that’s likely, the outlook will be grim. My grandmother, an hysterically unreasonable woman under the best of circumstances, is a bit of a basket case and has already declared that, whatever it is, he will fight it. The problem is that he won’t really know what he’s fighting for, not anymore. See, the brain damage from the hydro-cephalus limits his ability to form new memories. He’s kind of like that guy in Mememto--he only is in his life for about 15 minutes at a time. Then he forgets the previous 15 minutes and starts over.

Now, I won’t lie—sometimes we have found this to be amusing. My favorite Pap story in recent years happened a few years back at Christmas. Looking down to discover an opened present on his lap, but not really knowing how it got there, he asked my Grandmother what it was. Red! Red!, he bellowed(Nanna has the Lucille Ball hair, you see). What the hell is this? Nanna asked what it looked like. The reply? Looks like some kind of damn red shirt.

Some kind of damn red shirt. :)

But, if he can’t remember that it’s Christmas, can’t remember that he can’t drive a car anymore, can’t remember that he can’t walk without his cane, can’t remember what day it is or that his brothers are dead or that the cat is, I don’t know how he can make the decision to endure the pain and suffering that cancer treatments would bring. And if he can’t even remember why he’s doing it, I can’t imagine what hell it will be for him.

I don’t want him to die. But part of me thinks that it would be selfish, of all of us, to make him trudge on. Of course, there is another side to the coin—if he can’t remember whether he’s wearing underwear, can he reasonably refuse treatment, either?

Mostly, I just hope that the mass is nothing, that it’s scar tissue from the black lung, that it’s a benign growth, that it’s a shadow on the X-Ray.

If it is something, something bad, though the people that I will feel for the most are my Dad and his sister. Nanna would probably want to have him frozen and wheel him around in a portable cryo-unit before she’d let the doctors give up. He’s her whole life. No, ultimately, it will be Dad and Aunt Peggy’s decision to make.

I'm really glad it’s not mine.