Some thoughts about my grandfather upon his passing this morning via /r/gratitude

Hi, it might take me a little while to get to the gratitude part of this post, but I think, generally this sub is the best place on the internet and, while, I’d just like to essentially journal my thoughts here, I think we’ll discover together that my thoughts come from a place of gratitude, as I react to this news.

One of the first things I thought about upon hearing he died peacefully (at age 97) is that this wasn’t really his world anymore. While I’m grateful he got to be here so long and that his mind never never slipped even for a second, I could feel him disassociating a little bit from the world these last few months. He still followed the news, but I could tell it didn’t make much sense to him what was going on anymore (and again, I don’t mean that in the cognitive sense). This is a guy who grew up in the Great Depression, joined the navy at age 17 to fight the nazis (although he summed up his service “I froze my ass off in the North Atlantic”), then was a republican for most of my life until about a year or two into the first Trump admin when he registered democrat. In his last years he would go to a local “current events club” in his right-leaning community and respectfully argue with its members.

He was very proud of me and his three other grand children. He was very into the inner-workings of my career. He was a bit focused on the business-y aspects of things and I definitely got any amount of “toughness” I have from him (and I told him this on at least one occasion). The last time we zoomed, I was able to show him some of the inner workings of my work stuff that he really liked hearing about.

I was thinking about him last night because we were talking about going for a visit and I wanted to show him a video of something work-related, but he lost most of his vision these last few years, and I thought about how hard it must be to have your sight for 95 years and then just not have it anymore. Just some passing thoughts.

Of course we should all be so lucky to live as long as he did and to end up in a place of such comfort relative to where you started, with family members who love you, who you are proud of. I like to mention the stuff about his politics because it shows, to me about how he remained true to himself and wasn’t incapable of admitting he was wrong (even though he could be quite stubborn about some things).

He’s what comes to mind when I think of the word “patriarch.”

I think perhaps where gratitude comes in is what I first thought when I heard the news. “It’s just not his world anymore.” He can’t see. People he once agreed with are taking the world somewhere he doesn’t like and he can’t do anything about it. His kids are healthy and their kids are strong-willed, true to themselves, and prepared to carry the world forward, as he got to see on our weekly zooms (which started in the pandemic and have continued for 5 years). But at the end of the day, this is the best case scenario. To live long enough for it to not be your world anymore, and to have so much to show for it.