Do not be afraid. This was the only piece of advice that my grandfather had given me during his life. He committed suicide in July of '95 at the age of eighty-four. He killed himself after losing an argument with his girlfriend. His girlfriend was sixty-eight, and she had been right about whatever she was arguing. She was always right according to my mother.
My grandfather had poisoned himself with carbon monoxide in his youngest son's garage. The coroner told my uncle that he had arrived six hours too late.
Do not be afraid. He had some nerve. He gave me this nugget of wisdom fifteen years ago, when I was nine. Along with the platitude I received five dollars which I spent immediately on a Star Wars figure, or something like that.
That was the first and last time I saw him. When my mother told me about her father's death I asked her if she wanted me to attend the funeral. She hung up. I called her back and told her that I would go. She apologized for hanging up.
I took the following day off and went to the service. It was being held in the chapel of the Kelly Funeral Home on Somerset.
I was five minutes late. The service had yet to start anyway, so I didn't feel too bad. I went outside and smoked a cigarette with my uncle Gerry. He didn't speak. He just smoked his cigarette slowly and watched the traffic on Somerset. Gerry was usually very talkative. Gerry was the one who found my grandfather slumped over the wheel of his red '94 LeBaron.
My mother came to join us. My uncle finished his cigarette and flicked it onto the ground behind him. He walked to the front entrance of the funeral home and entered.
My mother lit a cigarette. I lit a fresh one off my first one. I had not talked to my mother for two months. "So, what's new?" she asked.
"Not much. Work's OK." I said, "My boss complains about his ex-wife all the time, but that's about it."
I felt bad about saying this since my parents had been separated for the last two years. I left the house about a month after my father had. I felt bad about this as well. I was always feeling bad.
My mother noticed my brief apologetic glance. "Don't worry about it. He's entitled to it." she said.
"Mom, stop it. Stop playing the goddamn martyr." I said.
"I know, I know."
We finished our cigarettes and entered the funeral home. There was a very small crowd assembled in front of the chapel doors. Most of the group consisted of my grandfather's friends. They were old. My sister and I were the youngest people in attendance. We were the only grandchildren.
The rest of the crowd consisted of my grandfather's children. There was my uncle Paul, my uncle Gerry, my aunt Georgina and my mother. My uncles and my aunt were with their spouses.
One of my uncles did not attend the funeral. That was my uncle Albert. He had died of exposure somewhere in Pembroke ten years ago. I never met him. My father told me just a short while before the funeral that uncle Albert had robbed a bank with a pen and a piece of paper, sometime in the late seventies. After he told me this story I thought that I would have liked my uncle Albert if I had met him.
The chapel was very small. Despite this it seemed to be half empty after all the mourners entered it. The lighting was dim and the room smelled like a freshly cleaned house. It made me drowsy.
Fortunately, the service was very short and very respectable. I looked at the mourners during the service. Some of them cried. Some did not. My mother and her sister cried. My grandfather's girlfriend cried. My uncle Gerry did not cry. He was still angry at my grandfather for choosing his house for a deathbed. I suppose Gerry failed his father in some way or another. I suppose it's none of my business.
After the service we left the chapel and consoled each other in the parking lot. We watched the pallbearers load my grandfather into the hearse. The driver tried to start the hearse. It would not start. The funeral home director apologized profusely and sent for another hearse. The pallbearers unloaded my grandfather and set him on a steel gurney. They stayed at the entrance while the rest of us walked to our cars.
I smoked and paced and watched the traffic on Somerset. Every once in a while I looked at the pallbearers. Gerry and Paul were two of them. The other four were my grandfather's friends. The old men chatted with Paul. Gerry just smoked in silence.
My sister stood beside me. She was watching the traffic. "How are things with Carrie?" she asked.
"We broke up last week." I said.
"That's too bad. Two years is a long time."
"No, not really. It's hard to forget, that's all."
"Do you remember him?"
"Vaguely. He seemed like an interesting man, full of stories and jokes."
"He told me not to be afraid."
"He told me the same thing."
My sister and I watched the second hearse as it pulled into the spot where the former one had been. The replacement was as clean and black as the first. The pallbearers went to work for the third time that morning. It was hot and the sky was overcast. But it did not rain that day.
After my grandfather had been placed in the replacement hearse we got into our cars. I rode with my mother and my sister in my mother's car. We pulled out of the parking lot and followed the hearse east on Somerset. Just before we exited the downtown core, onto Elgin, a Mercedes that wanted to make a right at the same intersection cut us off. "You sonofabitch," muttered my mother through lips pursed so tightly she seemed to be pulling her face into her mouth.
I said nothing. My sister was trying to find a good radio station. She had no luck in finding one.
When we arrived at the cemetery on Montreal Road my mother started weeping again. My sister put her hand on my mother's shoulder as we drove to the gravesite. My mother parked the car. She was still weeping as she got out.
I noticed that uncle Gerry's eyes were still clear. He was angry. His wife walked in silence behind him.
The grave had been dug. Two caretakers were taking a break under a tree that stood to the right of my grandfather's grave, about ten feet away. One was reading a newspaper and the other was eating a sandwich. They had good jobs. Nobody bothered them and they bothered nobody. They were a welcoming committee.
The last rites were read and the coffin was lowered into the grave. Gerry put his hand on my shoulder and said, "He was a good man."
He's a goddamn hypocrite.
I shook my uncle's hand and patted him on the shoulder without speaking. We returned to our cars. My mother had stopped weeping. She drove me home. I told my sister I would call her the next day. I went up to my apartment and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread. I wrapped the sandwich in waxed paper and placed it, a can of cola, and an orange in a plastic grocery bag.
The phone rang as I was leaving. I re-entered the apartment and stared at the phone. The answering machine took the call. It was Carrie. "Paul," she said in a flat voice, "we have to talk."
I picked up the phone. "Carrie?" I said.
"Paul. Hi. How've you been?"
I suddenly wished I had not taken the call. "Would it mean anything to you if I told you?" I said.
"Yes, of course it would."
"Then why the fuck haven't I heard from you in the past week?"
"Look, Paul, I didn't call to argue with you."
"Then why did you call, Carrie?"
"I want my books back."
"That's it? Some books? What about the jewelry, the lingerie, the clothes and all the other shit you left here?"
"I just want the books."
Carrie was not an avid reader - her reading list consisted of drugstore paperbacks and textbooks. The textbooks were important since Carrie was taking a couple of summer courses in accountancy. She figured the simpler the request the less time she would have to spend at my place. "I threw them out." I told her.
"You what?" she yelled.
"You heard me."
"You goddamn sonofa . . . ."
I hung up the phone. I did not feel like arguing. I had lied to Carrie: her books were still on my bookshelf.
Whenever we argued, Carrie was always right but I was always more stubborn. If my grandfather had any stubbornness within him he would still be alive. It does not matter who is right, this is not how arguments are won. The last person to leave the room, the person who gets that last word in without raising their hands up in frustration, this person is the winner. Logic has no place in relationships, in friendships, in rivalries.
Do not be afraid. Even if you are wrong, do not let it show.
The phone rang again. I ignored it this time and left the apartment and walked to Strathcona Park. The sun was making occasional appearances now, dissolving the grey ceiling of clouds, clearing the way for simple blue sky.
I bought a newspaper from a corner store situated along the way. I found a nice shaded area beneath a large maple tree and sat there. I ate my snack and read the paper.
A young couple was feeding a small flock of rude seagulls down by the Ottawa river, which ran south to north along the east end of the park. They laughed as the dumb scavengers fought for the stale bread crumbs that the couple tossed. A few pigeons mustered up the courage to hop along the edges of the elevated riverbank, in hopes of snatching a few stray morsels. They were unlucky, but persistent. The couple ignored the pigeons and the larger gulls chased the pigeons away.
The sun finally emerged victorious in the sky. I looked up in appreciation of this then returned to my paper. I found the obituaries and searched for the one written for my grandfather. I found it in the bottom right corner of the page:
That was all. No mention of surviving relatives, no mention of his once-cherished wife or of his recent beloved girlfriend. No mention of Uncle Albert, who was not a survivor, who simply was not. Eighty-four years summed up in five lines in the back of a local paper. I began to feel sorry for him.
What had he accomplished? I did not know, nobody ever talked about him. He left my mother's family when she was three years old. She attempted a reconciliation with him when I was a child, met him a few times for lunch, then lost track of him again.
The only one of his children with whom my grandfather kept in touch was Uncle Gerry. And Uncle Gerry never spoke of him to any of us. He was an absolute stranger to all that he had created: three sons and two daughters and two grandchildren.
I folded the paper and put it in a trash can. I stopped feeling bad about my grandfather. I never knew him and he never bothered to get to know me. I felt more connected to my late Uncle Albert. He was brave, an outlaw, he had the balls to rob a bank with nothing but a few words. I would have liked him, not because of his crime, but because he had courage, he was not afraid.
He was not a hypocrite.
The sun was setting, the blue dissipating into clear layers of yellow and pink, growing into solid layers of red and purple along the horizon. The couple who had been feeding the gulls walked ahead of me as I headed home. The woman was resting her head on the man's shoulder. They walked slowly, without concern for direction or time. I passed them and walked into my building. The couple passed by the building, into the cool young evening, slowly, silently, obviously in love.
Copyright: 1999 Patrick Seguin
