Just a second and we're gone Just an imprint when we're done

 

Tomorrow will mark 20 years since my grandfather passed away. You think with two decades behind you, it would hurt you less. I feel it this year more than I have in previous years. 20 years is a long time to be without someone.

 Time is supposed to "heal all wounds," but it doesn't. Our love for that person doesn't change. Some of us never stop grieving. My grandfather's death really set my entire life off on a spiral, and was the impetus for my mental collapse in my teenage years. I realized that with both his death, and my grandmother's, I never fully recovered. 

I just stopped talking about it.

I don't experience loneliness very often, because I spent most of my life alone. When I think of my grandparents not being here, I get lonely. 

There are many, many things I could say about my grandfather, but I want you to look at this photo below.

Somewhere in the fabric of the universe, this moment exists forever. Somewhere in the Super 8 reels of eternity, this moment exists forever.

When I was in kindergarten, my biological father would not come to get me after school. My parents were still married at the time. He would simply not show. The other kids would get picked up, and I would not. I would wait for hours. Finally, my grandfather, who had retired at this point and lived only a mile away from the school. would walk down to the school and come and get me. My grandfather spent the rest of the school year coming to get me from kindergarten, and didn't even wait for the possibility of my biofather. It wasn't until the last few years where I have really begun to process how neglected I was as a child because in the forefront of my mind exists images of my grandparents being my parents.

When I use the term neglect in this instance, I mean actual neglect. I mean left for home alone for hours as a child under 5. I mean unbathed, unfed, dirty clothes. When I wasn't being neglected, I was being physically and sexually abused.

I think about the fact that my father never came to pick me up from kindergarten, that I was abandoned and left behind, and that this was used against me by my teacher as if this was somehow my own personal moral failure (this woman was a monster to me). I think about how when my parents divorced and my mother got a restraining order, that he was around the schools I went to all of the time, stalking me. I think about it a lot sometimes, how my entire life for the first 17 years of my life, I lived in nothing but abject waking terror, and that wasn't supposed to effect me at all.

I think a lot of how this abuse has been weaponized against me, how I have been mocked by men who have abused me for having "Daddy issues." 

"Daddy issues."

I am not bitter or jealous of people with fathers. I am not bitter or jealous of those whose parents have stayed married, or those who have never had to want for anything in their lives. It wasn't even until recently that I realized that so little was done in my life to keep me safe. I guess mostly because most of what I remember about this time period was my grandfather walking the mile from my grandparents' house and walk me all the way back. We used to ride the bus and walk everywhere together.

I have been so lucky in so many ways.

Recently, I took the CDC's ACE test and scored a 10/10. I've thought a lot about how the same person who scores 10/10 on the CDC's ACE test could also have been someone who went to Disneyland every year as a child and how that is also the same person. Most of the photos of me as a child were of my with my grandparents in Disneyland. Those are the only photos of my childhood where I was actually happy, and not masking.

I've also thought a lot in the last two years about how poverty killed my grandfather. He had contracted a very rare blood disease from working in a factory for most of his adult life. He was the healthiest person I knew. Poverty killed my best friend. Especially in April of 2020 when so many of the Broadway people were complaining about the mere suggest that should have to get other jobs--because contracting Covid working at Walgreens was for other people who were beneath them, not them. I've thought about what an amazing artist my grandfather was, and how that was never even part of the equation--it simply was never an option for him.

I think about the impact my grandpa had on my life. I think about how many lives he had touched and how people whom I had never met will tell me when they meet me for the first time how much they loved my grandpa. 

I think about how this very small, quiet, humble little man made it a point to be a safe person for others, befriended everyone, loved all things living, great and small. I think of a man who collected toys and could not work unless he had an army of toys around him at all times. I think about how other people have or want expensive trinkets, and he was content and thrilled with having Happy Meal Toys in the places where expensive knickknacks would go.

I can't believe I have had to spend the last 20 years of my life without him. 

I look at the photo of walking with him again, and I just keep telling myself that somewhere in the fabric of the universe, this moment exists forever. Somewhere in the Super 8 reels of eternity, this moment exists forever.