It's days like this that make a girl wish she still kept an online journal to force the mundane everyday details of her personal life down everyone's throats. There are some things you want to write about that don't really fit into a Twitter post or a Myspace bulletin. You guys must think I'm such a ball of tragedy, I only have eight pages of journal entries and three are wracked with memorial awfulness of increasing degrees. I guess I just don't feel as desperate a need to write when things are going well.

In short, my grandfather died yesterday. For any old school friends here, you may remember him from my Jones Soda thread.



He would have been 70, this October. As a child he survived drinking a pint of turpentine, in the middle of a rural farm with no medical assistance save a strawberry soda for comfort; in the 1960s he survived being beaten in a drunken brawl with carnival workers in Podunk New Mexico, despite flat-lining at the hospital before rising up like a surly broken-armed Lazarus to drive his frightened and weary young family home. These are the stories we tell at every family gathering, that we would dare each other to go one dinner without mentioning, but the stories fell silent in January when he was diagnosed with cancer. 55 years of fidelity to Marlboro are what finally brought him down.

(My profile picture is suddenly a lot less savory.)

My mom and I lived with my grandparents for the first few years of my life, while my dad was stationed in barracks, before we got family military housing. Sometimes I think of my grandpa as more of a second father than as a grandfather, despite having a totally awesome father already. Is that selfish and self-absorbed? Probably. I'm the oldest grandchild by six years though, so I got them all to myself for a little while. I'm pretty lucky.

Six months ago he was helping my dad and boyfriend lift heavy furniture, helping us move in to our new apartment. Four months ago he was playing Rock Band with us after Thanksgiving dinner, rocking the drums on "Kids in America." Three months ago I was giving my grandparents a $50 gift card for a fancy romantic dinner. It has gone unused.

(Speaking of which, I'm incredibly worried about my grandma right now. She's been in great health, all things considered, but this past week she's been so worried she literally made herself sick. Like, she gave herself stress-induced shingles. I know, right?)

The funeral is going to be next week. I think they're going to make me write a eulogy. I'll probably include a lot of this in it. I want to visit all the parks he used to take me to when I was very small. Slauson, Gladstone, Pioneer. I wish I could visit our old backyard, with the tire swing and the hill he used to push me down in a wheelbarrow, but it belongs to somebody else now.

I keep meaning to come back online and catch up with all you guys, as I miss you all tons, and I feel like such a douche. I got sick for a while, and was busy with applying to grad school (update: waitlisted), then was sick again, and now I've been spending my weekends at my grandparents' for the past two months. I should have the time for it now.