Grandpa's Gun

I think the very worst part about it was His judgmental stare. 

Nothing had even been confessed yet, mentally or verbally, but I could feel the statue of Jesus on me. His permanently bloodied hands and aching face were stuck looking down on me with pure contempt. Desperate pleading. Several minutes had passed me and my mind was still focused primarily on the man above me. He wasn’t going to look away first, I guess. 

All of this stemmed from a strange type of guilt. 

My parents were strong and avowed atheists. For all the life that I can remember, they’ve fed me a steady diet of science and skepticism. Santa stopped being real back when I was seven and the tooth fairy was never remotely on my radar. Facts were facts and that’s all I ever knew, or all I was ever allowed to know. This type of philosophy, and the accompanying lack of spirituality, never really bothered me. As a kid, which I felt I was up until this moment, you don’t have to worry about death. Death was as real to me as the aforementioned childhood myths - an abstract idea that seemed sillily pointless in attempting to consider. 

Then, my grandfather killed himself.

It was five months ago and my parents, despite their now-hypocritical lifelong proclamation for truth and factuality, hid his cause of death from me for two of those months. It was a closed casket and they told me he had always wanted it that way. Grandpa was always a little shy, they said. Grandma weeped and wailed at the sight of it - her noises buried themselves deep into my core and made a foundation that still stands to this day. 

After the funeral, I stayed with my cousins for the night since evidently grief also breeds longing. Mollie and Jack had both gone to sleep but I couldn’t keep my eyes shut for more than a minute or two. Bad visions; worse thoughts. I’ve never slept well in the homes of others and the sheets felt tight around my ankles - they trapped me in forced stillness. Quietly, I headed to the kitchen for a snack and found him kicked back in the dirty recliner with a cold drink in his hand and anger dripping off his brow. My uncle was always unsavory; a figure that I was long taught to avoid unless necessity required it. Over more than a few beers, he spilled the beans that his dad was “a coward who betrayed the entire family” by “eating a bullet for no damn reason”. Uncle Billy assumed I had already known and I very quickly realized that a heart attack had nothing to do with guns or cowardice of any type. Complete shock. Even if I had questioned, utilized all this taught skepticism, and pondered the death of my grandpa…suicide would have never been considered. 

Old people don’t kill themselves. Suicide is for depressed songwriters, or troubled veterans, or guilt-ridden murderers. 68 year old retired plumbers don’t off themselves and they don’t intentionally leave behind teenage grandchildren - they lose battles to cancer, or crash their car because they can’t see all that good anymore, or if they’re lucky; drift off in the peaceful sleeping hours. So, why did mine blow his brains out on a quiet, snowy Thursday morning at home? 

My training was futile - I couldn’t grasp this shit and there didn’t seem to be any truism to the situation at all. We all loved him and he loved us; I knew that. Grandma Lissy and him always got along, I hadn’t seen them argue once ever and even my dad said the same. Vermont gets cold and windy but Grandpa loved the snow more than anything - we would ride sleds down the hill, towards the shed, and into the chicken fence for hours every single snow day growing up. Money wasn’t an issue, not that I knew, and they both lived a simple, low-cost life out in the woods. Happiness isn’t a quantifiable thing but I was confident that Grandpa leaned farther towards it than the contrary. 

Square peg, round hole; none of the pieces fit. 

There was no note. “Keep the toast warm for me,” Grandma claimed those as the last words he spoke to her. She had been cooking for him when the first loud bang was followed by another, heavier bang in their bedroom. When she told me this, I pictured his blood pooling up quickly on the floor and how she could have tripped on the body when she walked in the room. My brain always worked this way and I couldn’t help it - everything was so literal. Smells, stains, how the grimy outline could outlive the both of them; these things permeated my warped sense of grief. Conceptualization was the first requirement for understanding. Grandpa’s dead body wasn’t the same as Plato’s Cave, though - I didn’t want to contemplate the size of his head wound or what type of gun he used to create it. All I wanted was to accept it for what it was; an inconceivable decision that I would likely never possess the ability to solve, explain, or justify. Death had visited me though I could not see It nor speak to It. Worse yet, I know It will come again and I will have just the same amount of control over It - this, through trauma, I’ve now learned to embrace. 

St. Joe’s was very welcoming to me and Father Paul assured me that the process would take as long as I needed.

“God doesn’t set timelines,” he said, “he only reveals them.”

Despite best efforts, my analytical mind was still set to overdrive. I regretted not embracing the eternal unknown, opening my eyes to the potential beyond our lives here, and letting my heart be open to blind belief. Death and tragedy shouldn’t have been the necessary cost for my admission to church. Regret turned to resent and I blamed my parents for so much of it. Father Paul would probably chastise that notion as he did when I asked if my grandfather was in Hell or not. None of it serves me well - the endless thinking or the incessant search for fact. In Him, and all of them, the doubts would answer themselves in time. 

So, I close my eyes and clasp my hands - I’m comfortable with loss, now, and I take solace in His stare.