I feel the need to start off this post by saying I do not, I repeat, I do not have a fascination with death. The morbidity of it is not what gets me, it actually, in fact, scares the living crap out of me. It is rather the finality of it that gets me. Death is the ultimate and highest form of closure, the great equalizer, as I have heard countless times and that leaves one belonging to the ages. There is no going back.

Two weeks ago my grandpa died.

In my entire life there were only three deaths that affected me (thank god only three during my 27 years) but two of them affected me more so and with one in particular that shook me to my core and left me with his initials tattooed in black lower-case script on my upper right forearm. It was the only way for me to heal.

My grandpa or Papa as I had only called and known him by was born Harry Siegel on May 28, 1922. My mother’s verbal spelling of her maiden name Siegel plays back in my head whenever I write or type S-i-e-g-e-l  out. Papa was 92 when he passed away and lived an unbelievable life and was married happily for 66 years to my grandmother. As a young girl and even as a young woman I was never anything less than intrigued and surprisingly jealous of the life he lived: he grew up during The Great Depression, was a medic in WWII and very recently I learned he took part in transcribing the historical Geneva Convention, he owned numerous business, he partied, dressed impeccably, ate and drank well, raised three beautiful children and watched his grandchildren grow—-I’m not quite sure what more a human being could want out of life. My jealously stemmed from living through history, quite literally—he lived history and lived through a by-gone glamorous era that I have only seen on a film screen, read in history books and when I listened to his retelling of his place in history. I only regret never writing it down but I know I would do Papa proud and great justice by remembering and writing whatever I could. I could never get enough of his stories.

I remember Papa going through old photo albums, showing me family and old friends and then I remember him showing me his wedding album. It was hard for me to turn the pages of the album because I couldn’t stop staring at the pictures, somehow thinking that if I stared at them long enough I would find something more than what I could actually see and that if I concentrated hard enough I could imagine and be present on the actual day in1948. They both looked so young, so vital and just so unbelievably happy. My grandmother looked so beautiful. Papa made sure to point out that at his wedding he wore blue suede shoes. He was fashionable and ahead of his time and wore them way before Elvis sang about someone having the nerve to step on his blue suede shoes. It was hard to tell from black and white but I could tell they were gorgeous and of course, tasteful.

A couple of weeks before Papa passed away he fell and broke his hip. My parents ran at two in the morning at the heeding of my grandmother’s frantic phone call. My Dad, a man who has a deep understanding of the human condition, listened to my grandpa’s request to leave him and let him lie on the floor a little longer than he should have: if I go to the hospital then it’s over.

The words are haunting but my father understood more so than my mother and I. I was so angry when I asked why they didn’t call 911 right away but it wouldn’t have changed anything. He had broken his hip and several over bones. After successful hip repairment surgery at 92 and then the unfortunate but very common contraction of pneumonia and succeeding treatment, he eventually left the hospital at the doctor’s request. We were told that he was responding to the antibiotics and that he was well enough to be transferred to a rehabilitation center while he heals and gets over the pneumonia.

When Papa entered the rehab facility I did not recognize him, he had become a mere shadow of who he was: a powerful man with a powerful voice and strong convictions. He was in a fog and kept saying he felt like a fool. You were never a fool Papa.

On the last day I saw him, he looked at me and I wasn’t sure if he knew it was me or that he even saw me. I was His Taryn and he always knew when I was there—I was his gorgeous. Papa, at 92, never lost his faculties, he was in a post-surgery fog but I feared something else was going on even though I didn’t want to believe it. I saw him close his eyes tightly and then breathe deeply. I asked him if he was OK. He nodded. Before we left him, he whispered something into my mother’s ear that she couldn’t quite understand but she heard “Mom”. His voice was weak and it was hard to hear him during that time. My mother later realized that he said: Take care of Mom.

The next day he was gone. I picked up the phone from the doctor at the hospital they had brought Papa to. He passed away, the doctor said. I didn’t hear anything else he said to me. It was October 27th.

The morbidity seeps in: we went down to the morgue to see him and the morgue is every bit as scary as it sounds and is as cold as it looks, down to the gentleman who brought Papa out–he himself looked cold and pale. That can’t be Papa, I thought. That is not him. I was insistent but not out loud. I was in a fog. I couldn’t speak. This is not how it’s supposed to happen.

But then again, it never is.

I approached my father a day later who was in the midst of planning out the funeral and I began to ask questions and realized, for the first time, that he was right to let my grandpa lie on he floor of his bedroom, which would be for last the time, and heed his request to not take him to the hospital right away as my grandmother was shouting that he was alright. I knew, he said to me, I wanted him to be as comfortable as possible because I knew that this was it. Then why didn’t you say anything—-I angrily thought. My Dad knew how much Papa hated and mistrusted doctors and hospitals—Papa’s younger brother Dave, a doctor himself, died during the prime of his life because doctors had mistreated and misdiagnosed him about 50 years prior. My mother told me he never got over his brother Dave’s death.

Papa knew.

In the weeks since his death I have only begun to go through the clinical stages of grief not in any particular order as you do jump around from one stage to the other: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think I am still in denial and starting to border on anger. Although my anger in general stems from many different things.

I miss Papa so much and because I truly am in denial I still think he is there, at home, and that this is just a time when I’m really busy and have not gotten the chance to see him. Two weeks ago I went to his apartment to help my mother find some paperwork—it felt so empty, like a tangible, heavy emptiness that one cannot describe, it can only be felt.

But I know he’s gone.

I also began to think about death a lot and in all different forms, not just the physical as I, myself, am dealing with a form of my own, personal death: a new, scary, yet exciting chapter in my life. With Papa’s death, I felt that my childhood died along with him. I know a lot of grandparents aren’t fortunate enough and with human life being limited, to see you reach full adulthood, marriage and if you do desire and if you’re lucky enough to have them, children. My Papa won’t get to see those wonderful momentous occasions but I am happy to know that he has remembered me, his first grandchild, as the little girl he watched grow into a young woman. I’m glad that I got to maintain that innocence, in a way, in his eyes.

Getting back to my own “death”—I have reached an impasse, which I have spoken about numerous times but I am at the edge of the cliff right now, looking down and then looking up and waiting to see what happens when I take the leap in the next couple of weeks—-will I fall or will I be like Icarus and fly as high as I possibly can despite the consequences because as with everything there always are. I must clarify, by my own “death” I mean morphing into a new person, into a newer me, one that I have never seen before but one that I am slowly growing into. In order to be the new me, the old me must die and that is not such a bad thing. You can never go back to being who you were.

Papa was proud and I know that Papa would be so proud of where I am going in my life as I move towards my career and work towards my future goals little by little each day.

When anyone would ask Papa if he was comfortable, even to his dying day, he would always say:

Eh, I make a living.

I love you Papa, rest in peace. You now belong to the ages.

Your Taryn xo