Just Begun: My Granddaddy Scott

When Granddaddy Scott died he spoke to me in a song.

Or that's how it felt anyway.  Truth is, I'd had a song recorded from the radio that I'd been listening to quite a bit.

John Denver sang it and I thought it was pretty.  Before that morning it was a song about romance, but when my grandfather died, it became him telling me that everything was going to be okay.


I remember that morning like it happened today.  I was 17, and sat at the turquoise desk my mom had painted to match the turquoise and pink bedroom I had when I was a kid.  I was trying to do my hair and get ready for school.

Mom said I didn't have to go to school.  She asked if I wanted to go over to grandmother and granddaddy's house.  I thought I probably should go.  My grandmother might need me.  She'd sounded so terrified and lost when she called that morning.  "Daddy's dying." she said. 

I almost threw the phone at my mother and ran to my bedroom to gasp for air and pray I'd misunderstood. 

But, no.  I hadn't misunderstood.  And no.  I just couldn't go to their house.  I didn't want to see my grandfather dead. 

I wanted to see him how he was yesterday.  And the day before that.  The way he'd been my entire life.  The way I wanted him to always be.  Over at his house, seeming to just be waiting for me to show up and brighten his day. 

He was actually very busy.  My grandparents had loads of friends and family forever coming and going.   They probably should have installed a revolving door at their house.  Still, they made me feel like the only person in the world when I came by.

Looking back I wonder why I didn't just stay there all day every day.  Soak up every minute I could have with them.  But they'd always been there, and I thought they always would be there. 

---

But now my grandfather, Samuel Thornton Scott...was no longer there.

He was such a solid person.  I think everyone depended on him to always be that calming presence in every room.  He would fix anything and everything at the church, at the home's of my grandmother's friends.  He taught Sunday school for years and years.  If you needed someone to say grace at a covered dish dinner, or family reunion...Sam would do it. 

If you needed a story to cheer you up, knock some sense in you, or to calm you down in a difficult time...he'd have one available.

How could he be gone?

---

Mom said I could stay home from school, but the idea of sitting home alone under a boulder of pain seemed like a prison sentence.  I thought I could kind of push it to the side, scoot out from under it, walk to school...and things might be better than this agony.  If I did my normal life, told no one, then nothing would have changed.

Just as I was sitting there frozen, staring in the mirror, tears pouring down my face, thinking of the unbearable: that I would never get to see my granddaddy again.   EVER????  And thinking how wrong this was.  How impossible.  How absolutely unfathomable to me...

Just then the tape recorder came around to this song, and I felt it wasn't just a bad recording off the radio of a John Denver pop song...it morphed into my beloved granddaddy speaking directly to me, showing me how to deal with life without him:

    "Lady, are you crying?
     Do your tears belong to me?
     Did you think our time together was all gone.
     Lady, you've been dreaming, I'm as close as I could be,
     And I swear to you, our time has just begun."

It didn't feel like a song I'd heard many times before.  It really and truly felt different.  Like him speaking directly to me.  Showing me the way as he'd always done.  In his calm and unassuming way.  It felt like he was saying I wouldn't really ever be without him after all.

And maybe that's been true.

---

I think of him the same way I did when I could just walk over to his house and 'hug his neck'.  Back when I could follow him around his garage handing him whatever tool he asked for, or around his garden, arms extended to hold the armfuls of vegetables to take into grandmother.

When I finally did see my grandfather dead, it was at the funeral home.

It's good to see the body.  Partly to let you know they are not there anymore.  Leaving you no fantasies or questions. 

But, also, to let you know that it really isn't your loved one in the casket.  Because you know, obviously, that they were not just inside the shell of the body.  They were the spirit that gave the body life.

For me it wasn't just that they didn't put his glasses on, and therefore it looked nothing like my grandfather ever did to me.  But when you know for a fact that your loved one is more spirit than flesh, you have to wonder where that spirit has gone.

Maybe the song that kept playing in a loop in my head was right.  Maybe he was not so far away.

Lord knows he has stayed in my heart and my thoughts through all these years.  Maybe it's like in  the movie Coco; loved ones who've gone before us do somehow know what we're up to, and as long as we remember them, they stay alive.

Perhaps we are closer than we think.  I heard someone describe death as falling asleep in one room and waking up in another.  Maybe Grandaddy did that, and maybe he's in the next room not far away at all.

The thought comforts me, anyhow.

--

When I think of him it's rarely any particular time, or detail, or anything specific that he said.  I don't really even remember anything in detail.  A certain word he said will come to me, or the way he'd say it, in his slow Texas drawl.  All I really remember clearly is hugging him.

Hugging my granddad was the happiest thing in my world.  He always smelled of soap and the starch my grandmother used to iron all his clothess, and of sweat and sunlight and earth.

There was a sense I had just being around him, that I was enveloped by his love.  That he thought whatever I did was great.  That he didn't worry about me, that he thought I was perfect exactly as I was.

Like Maya Angelou said:  "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

I was oh-so-lucky to have in my life someone who always made me feel like a million bucks.