That Shall Never Diminish

As so many times before, I dreamt my grandfather alive again.  Two of my sisters led me into the dining room of our Pacific Street house to find him.  Grandfather was sitting in a wheelchair.  His skin was tanned, as if from spending a long summer under the sun.  I saw the fishhook scar on his head where doctors had worked on his become-forgetful brain.  He smiled at me.  Big smile.

Though excited to see my grandfather, I wondered if he really recognized me after all these years.  He departed this life in sweet and total confusion, unable to drive or prepare a meal, and sometimes muttering in his childhood Canadian French.

I came full awake in my bed just as I reached out to touch my grandfather.

Cheated before I reached him fully alive again.

Not to sleep again, I soon found myself caught up in a cascade of real memories.  Fishing.  Talking at his table.  Watching him tending his garden.  He and his dog.

 

I thought about how my sister and I were forced to put his dog down near the end of all.   I broke down when we reached the veterinarian’s clinic.  I sat in the car convulsing with sobs as my sister carried the trembling dog into the veterinarian’s clinic.

The dog knew.

My sister stayed with the dog until the very end.   “I didn’t want to leave her alone,” she said when she returned to the car after a time indeterminable.

There exists a kind of grief that shall not diminish in single lifetime.  Sorrow big enough to fill the space between stars.  Sorrow that can crush mountains.  Time lacks the steel to cut such anguish.

     

That is what filled me as I lay there freshly awake in my bed.

--Mitchell Hegman