This post is a Theme Thursday response, but I have decided to stop adding “Theme Thursday” to the beginning of my titles because nearly every post in the last 8 weeks has been a Theme Thursday response, so that should be clear by the embedded reddit post at the bottom of each response.
This response is very personal to me. For the very broad topic this week of ‘Music’ I started 3 other stories before I decided to write from the heart. If it’s raw and a little overwrought, it’s because writing it was a bit raw and overwrought.
Here’s to you, Grandpa. And here’s your song:
I learned this song for you, Grandpa.
You lived to “see” your seventy seventh birthday, if one could call it that. I wouldn’t. By that point you were an empty body, hardly cognizant of the world, absent to the daily routine we all kept to watch over your bed. I took the afternoon shifts so I could sit with you, even if you never woke. I learned this song to say goodbye.
Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry. You don’t know how lovely you are.
Now that I can play it, I don’t want to. Even the first couple bars threaten what will happen if I continue on, to push through to the lyrics. No one ever heard me play it. Alone in the dark when no one was home I’d open my upright piano and let the acoustics surround me as I wept and played. Tears stream down my face, and the words don’t really form correctly. It’s best if I don’t sing it. I won’t. I can’t ever again.
I had to find you, tell you I need you, tell you I set you apart…
Hearing it on a playlist sends my fingers flying for the ‘next’ button. I can’t do it. I can’t hear it again. I never got to play it for you, or say how much you meant to me. Where other people hear a sad love song I hear a funeral dirge.
No one ever said it would be easy.
The understatement of the year. That summer was hard, harder than you’ll ever know, Grandpa. They used my picture of you for the obituary, the only one you ever let me take. You and I were sitting at the dead-end of our street, soaking in the last rays of the summer sun. You looked over at me, sun behind you, and gave me that little crooked half smile you always had.
It’s such a shame for us to part.
At your funeral service I said how much I loved you, and with little humor I said that I was your favorite. Everyone laughed. Maybe they thought I was joking, that at sixteen years old I couldn’t possibly know.I know I was. Maybe I was the grandchild you wanted to take under your wing, to do just one thing right. They tried to stay positive about you, but it was clear you had your struggles like everyone else. I guess that’s what happens when you go from being 6’1’’ to wheelchair bound for the rest of your life.
No one ever said it would be this hard.
Why this song? I wanted to go back to before it all started, before the tests came back positive, before you decided to die on your own terms instead of fighting the cancer.
Oh, take me back to the start.
This will always be your song to me.