The Measure Of A Man

My first experience with death came when my Great Grandmother passed while she was visiting us at our home in Monterey, California. I was 5. I was outside playing in the back yard, showing off a new-to-me hand-me-down letterman-style jacket that I’d bizarrely paired with a turtleneck and shorts. Mom and Dad came out to tell us that Gram the Great—as we called her—had gone home to God. I didn't really understand what that meant, although I was instantly filled with a kind of numinous certainty that my sister’s bed would now be haunted because Gram had been sleeping there when she died.

That same vague certainty of her lingering presence haunting that bed stayed with me even into high school, although a dozen years had passed and we’d moved four times by then. Maybe it’s because of the awful prayers I was taught as a kid. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake…” Wait...could you run that last part by me again? I could die in my sleep?! What kind of bullshit is that to teach a kid? I inherited that bed frame once my sister moved out, and I took it because it was better than the old bunkbeds I'd been using. But believe you me, I hadn’t forgotten for a second that it had been the portal from whence Gram had exited this mortal coil to whatever may lie beyond.

Not being especially superstitious—but, you know...a little stitious all the same—I pushed those preternatural instincts aside and for the most part slept easy in the bed, which was really just the same bare-bones frame by that point, as the mattress had long since gone on to the great landfill in the sky. Even so, on the occasional uneasy night of slumber, I always had to push that same lingering uneasiness back into the dark from whence it came, reassuring myself of the nuts-and-bolts nature of the world. Perhaps owing to some racial memory encoded in my genes, handed down across ten thousand years of ancestral fears of whatever lurked beyond the guttering firelight.

CS Lewis said that if you were in a room and told that a hungry tiger was outside the door, you would feel a kind of apprehension specific to the level of danger that represents. But if you were told that there was a malicious ghost outside the door, and you actually believed it, the kind of feeling that might induce would be entirely different. The latter is the kind of fear that we reserve for Death—Capital D—as the great unknown. Not necessarily for a specific death—lower-case d—like cancer and car accidents (or a tiger) in its practical specificity. More like the approach of our inevitable demise at some unknown point in the future, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing. 

If you’re a practical person, eventually those kinds of fears give way to more realistic concerns. You trade monsters under the bed for concerns about cholesterol and blood pressure, serial killers for car accidents, and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes for worries about your 401(k). We stop having time for boogeymen and statistically-improbable scenarios as we age, and the practical realities of the concurrent aging of our loved ones creates a kind of schedule of events we will have to deal with. Most likely your grandparents will pass first, then your parents and so on down the line. When my grandfather Bruce passed, it wasn't really unexpected. He was 97. At that age, everything is considered a “natural cause.” 

I had a complicated relationship with Bruce, and had from the very beginning. He was a complex man, who had never had it easy in life. Born in the 20s and raised in the teeth of the Great Depression, he’d been forced to leave home in his teens and bounced around from relative to relative and foster home to foster home. A ferociously intelligent guy, he was also a veteran of two wars and retired as a full Bird Colonel from the Army to enter into the world of business. He had four kids to support by then, and raised them in the Fear of God and himself—not necessarily in that order—which couldn’t have been easy, considering what a bunch of knuckleheads they are.

But he married the hardest working, most gentle and compassionate woman this side of Mother Theresa, and she raised their daughter and three sons in the reverence of their father, and guarded the empire of his reputation fiercely. She never had an unkind word for anyone, and certainly never tolerated anyone speaking ill of Bruce in the slightest. To this day, his kids—my Dad, aunt, and uncles—have nary a harsh word for him, although he died owing all of them tens of thousands of dollars each. His numerous failed business initiatives took their toll on the family and defined him for most of my life. The fact that he pursued these wacky import/export schemes even as his wife was dying in the care of his daughter—having not seen him for months on end—did not escape my notice.

As a kid, I knew none of the details of his awful, impoverished upbringing, nor any of the complexities of his relationship with his wife and kids. How could I? I just knew he was a mean old man. He hit me in the eye pitching a baseball when I was visiting him as a five year-old, and then found my crying to be an annoyance, and my shiner to be humorous. Another time, he spilled hot coffee on me when I was riding in the front seat with him on a road-trip and forced me to get into the back seat until I could get my tears under control. He always kicked us off the TV when he got home so he could watch Hawaii Five-O, while he at popcorn and drank beer. We could go outside, or we could shut the hell up. Preferably, go outside and shut the hell up.

By the time I was in my teens, I was pretty ambivalent toward him, if not actually hostile. I didn’t care to know the complexities of his life, which might have mitigated my simmering disdain, preferring instead my teenaged certainty about him and the whole world. As a feminist, my Mom was deeply offended by his imperious chauvinism, and constantly held him up as a cautionary tale on how not to live life. A lesson I was only too happy to glom onto, donning the mantle of virtuous disapproval quite proudly.

After Grandma passed, we were witness to Bruce marrying two subsequent women, essentially caretakers, who were substantially younger than him. They decimated his collection of antiques, unique artifacts from his globe-spanning business travels, and numerous irreplaceable family heirlooms, selling them off as they stole from him and even beat him occasionally. When he was finally too old to stop us, we moved him and his third wife—54 years his junior—almost forcibly up to our area so that we could keep an eye out, and spend the remaining days of his life in some kind of relationship with him. He made it about three more years before the end came to find him.

His 97th birthday was a pretty impressive shindig. It is literally the only time in my life that I have been in the same room with my entire extended family on my Dad’s side. We had a ball, renting out a conference hall and a wing of hotel rooms. His irreverent scalawag sons bought him illegal Cuban cigars and Playboy magazines. What those chowder-heads would do if they weren’t always out making themselves better citizens is anyone’s guess, but here was fine food and drink aplenty, professional photography, and a lovely time was had by all. As though he took it as a farewell sendoff, Bruce lapsed into a coma two days later.

By then, everyone had made it back to the various parts of the country they called home; California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and North Carolina. So when the call came at midnight, I was the one left to deal, which struck me as an unpleasant irony. Out of everyone, my Mom and I probably had the hardest feelings toward Bruce, and yet we’d been the ones to move him up to Oregon. It was like wrangling a kicking and biting mule into the harness, only to have to drag him the whole the way. At one point, I actually thought I might have to throw down with him to get him into the car, and I was only 70/30 on whether or not I could take the wiry old bastard. As part of the US Army’s Mounted Cavalry Division, he’d literally ridden warhorses into actual battle, and that’s a level of batshit crazy you can never entirely discount. Three years and a lot of hard miles later, I was the one headed to the ICU in the middle of the night.

When I got there, I found his wife in a heap of tears. She was a virtual stranger to me, essentially a hybrid of step-relation and employee, which made it more a relationship of familial obligation than any real affection. So finding myself asked to comfort someone I barely knew over the unsurprising fact of the passing of her 97 year-old ersatz spouse, whom I’d felt conflicted toward at best, I approached with a fair amount of stoicism. I had a plethora of pre-packaged platitudes at the ready, after which I was inundated with more medical information than I could process. The specifics of his brain and heart activity were instantly translated by my own brain into, “He’s old and dying.” Eventually, she asked me to pray for Bruce.

I’ve always worn the mantle of counselor, since I was in Jr. High. I have no idea how I came to find myself in the role, but it’s a natural one to me. So although I’m a carpenter by trade, I’ve spent many an hour on the phone and in person, listening, counseling, and praying with lost, hurting people. It seems honorable enough, so I’m alright with it; but being asked to pray for the recovery of Bruce hit me pretty hard where I live. The idea of interceding for him left a bitter taste in my mouth. But I always toe the line, so I stepped into his room, leaving my wife and his out in the waiting area.

As the door closed behind me, my eyes took a few seconds to adapt to the dim light in his room. In that moment I saw what a frail little bundle of bones was laying in that bed, and something inside me turned. Looking at him there, it was hard to remember what it was that I’d been so angry with him about. Or how someone so small and helpless could ever had held such sway in my life. It was then that I saw that regardless of what he’d done in life—whether or not he’d ever succeeded in business, whether he was loved, respected, or just feared—this was his end. Regardless of how hard his life had been, or whatever explanation there was for him to have behaved the way he had, he was meeting his end.

And I heard a very small voice in me, one that’s clear if I'll be quiet for a minute, telling me something I needed to hear. I like to think of it as the voice of Grace, and it lets me know when it’s time to shut up, when it’s time to apologize, and when I’m just being a dick. I think my life would be a lot better if I listened to it more often. There in the hush of Bruce's room, with only his monitors and labored breathing as accompaniment, I heard that voice quite clearly. Grace said it wasn't time to pray for recovery, but to say goodbye and send him on his way instead.

So I did.

I said goodbye to Bruce. I said goodbye to hard feelings and bitterness, and to the scripted drama of outrage, offense, and disapproval that I’d been rehearsing and rehashing all of my days. Because Grace told me that whatever fate I imagined him deserving, he was meeting his, just as I would one day meet my own. And whatever mercy he needed to compensate for his awful upbringing, or whatever judgment he deserved for all his selfish actions, were none of my business. He owed God one death, and he was delivering on that. As I myself would one day, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing.

I thought of words dear to me: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” I decided to let him go in the sincere hope that he be measured in Grace and Mercy, just as I will surely need to be. And how, brother.

Bruce passed two hours later, and I’ve never felt another moment of disapprobation or negativity toward him. In fact, I’ve since discovered that the old codger was on to something: popcorn and beer together are just about the best thing since sliced bread. Who’da thunk it? I read somewhere that holding onto offense and anger against someone else is like drinking poison and then waiting for them to die. That sounds about right to me. Forgiveness is for the living, and it benefits the wounded as much as the offender. Perhaps more. Whatever fate there is to meet, each of us will find our own in time.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will find mercy.”