When I was a young tyke, I’d stay with my grandma Blanche (dad’s mom) for at least a week during summer vacations. One of my more durable memories from that time was sitting in front of the television at night, each of us behind our own tray table with a TV dinner set on top. A highlight was picking which dinner I wanted (I’m looking at you Swanson’s Salsbury Steak or enchilada combo situation), then climbing into the armchair facing whatever summer replacement show happened to be our favorite at that moment, then noshing and watching side by side. The one I remember most: The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, which was holding space for the Sonny and Cher show since they apparently deserved the kind of summer-off span that I was enjoying. (Entertaining and fourth grade are no doubt really similarly taxing.) My grandma and I would sit in our highly upholstered floral chairs, mine with a throw pillow on the seat so I could reach my tray and I’d follow her lead on when to laugh or hmm or exclamicate. Once dinner and the show were over, climbing down would commence. This would require some gymnastics though I always remember doing it on my own, and being proud of my self-sufficiency.

My grandpa Emmer was still alive although living in a place called the Four Palms Convalescent Hospital, which is now called the Centinela Skilled Nursing & Wellness Centre West (I know that because I just looked it up). It exists in my memory bank as somewhere grim. Even though I don’t think I ever stepped through the door of the place while he lived there. The only memory I have is of sitting in the backseat of our car, my parents in the front talking about which of them would be escorting him out of the decades-long home he’d shared with my grandma and escorting him to the new place. I found a letter in a lockbox while cleaning out my dad’s—because there’s always a lockbox*—from the place to my grandma in 1974 that they’d raised the monthly cost. I was 13 years old at that point and thinking he was there and had been for years and that I never was taken to visit makes me extraordinarily sad. I don’t remember thinking that he was even alive. I don’t remember thinking about him at all after a certain age.

I do remember loving him. And that when we were together, he was fully present, which I see from photos and home movies. There we are splashing in the pool at the house in Palm Springs where we’d go for family vacations, showing him my dolls at Christmas, staring at him while he cleaned his pipe. I have a very strong memory of being eight-or-so, sitting on a bar stool in between him and my dad looking back and forth while sipping a Shirley Temple and staring at the snails in front of me that they were stabbing with small forks and eating. I tried one and remember the rubbery chewiness and the garlic butter and soaking that up with bread. (Apparently, the experience was so enjoyable that later, when I saw a snail in our back garden, I picked it up and was about to pop it into my mouth when my mom, in a split-second reaction around how to stop this from happening, turned the hose on me. I still do eat the odd escargot though.)

I have only a rudimentary sense of how my dad felt about his dad. We’ve talked about him a lot. What he did for a living and how he’d wanted to move to New Orleans, which in the end was overruled for LA so they could be close to my dad who’d left Moline, IL, where they’d all lived to come west for art school. As passionate as my dad gets about his parents has to do with his thoughts around his mom being the boss of the family. But even when I pay a lot of attention to his face or tone of voice when we talk about Emmer, there’s very little emotion there. In photos my dad seems present yet not overly so. It’s really hard to tell. And when I was young, he never talked about his parents. They were either always there or not at all. No talk of great-aunts or great-uncles (only because of that lockbox have I discovered I had any). We seemed to be an independent spaceship shedding various outer casings as we shot farther away from familial earth and I, for one, didn’t even notice. An only child of only children.

When I think of my grandpa alone in those final years I am crying. I am envisioning a bed in a room with other people. I’m feeling the isolation, the strangeness. I’m imagining smells and sounds that suggest a hospital where the point is to just keep someone breathing. I’m making that up given I never saw for myself, but yet, that’s how I understand those places to be back then. (Scroll to 1960s/1970s here.) Currently, looking in on my dad and seeing his one-bedroom decorated with his Eames chair and his art, watching him sit and stare, it’s hard for me to not make up a story that he is sad or lonely. And maybe he is. But maybe he isn’t. When asked the question, he says he’s good. Not bored. Just fine. He hasn’t made any moves to get to know the people on the other side of his door, down the hall in the community area or the dining room (even though I kind of have and in future posts will look forward to telling some stories with them as players because the ones I’ve met are a kick in the ass). But I can’t make that connection happen for him. That’s for him to do as they reach out and introduce. My role is to love him and hang out with him as daughters will do. To take care of him inasmuch as I can make some things easier. But ultimately, just like me being proud of climbing down out of my chair after TV dinners with my grandma, I feel fairly certain that he still has the self-sufficiency to launch up and out of his chair in order to make his way to a place where he is self-sufficient in whatever way that means for him.

* Looking forward to telling lockbox stories in future.