Grandpa had been asleep a week or two, but his health had been on the decline for much longer due to the onset of dementia. I was apprehensive about being alone in the hospital room with him. It was nothing against him, really. It was, however, something against my sister. I was visiting Michigan from New York, looking forward to a week of free food and zero responsibility at our mother’s house, when Brianne came by to stress how crucial it was that I visit Grandpa. I must do it right away. Alone. I had to trust her on this. He might even speak to me, like he’d spoken to her. 

As she tells it, during her visit with Grandpa, Brianne said to him, “Grandpa, you gotta wake up.” You can clearly see this is a woman who can’t relax unless she is telling members of her family what to do. Grandpa has to wake up, I have to visit Grandpa. It’s endless. But this particular admonishment seemed to work: hearing her voice somewhere deep within, Grandpa allegedly hit himself on the leg and softly proclaimed, “I can’t.” 

I suggested she might be overselling it. Again, I had no objection to seeing Grandpa, but Brianne’s fanatical testimony — delivered while I was still in my pyjamas and Mom hadn’t even begun to fry up my pound of bacon, nor my three eggs which she fried in the grease of said bacon — forced me into the role of skeptic, and I was now considering not visiting Grandpa at all, as an act of defiance. 

Finally, I agreed to go, but promised myself I’d feel nothing.

Mom and I were about to get into her van to go see Grandpa, and Brianne was about to go back to her house, probably to do her Bible journaling or to restore some violin she found in the garbage. 

Before we departed, Brianne said to Mom, “So yeah, give Brad, like, five minutes in there.” 

It vexed me that she addressed this to our mother, as if Grandpa’s hospital room were an alternate dimension Brianne had discovered and decided she owned and Mom was the administrator of this dimension: “Visitors to Brianne’s Secret Grandpa Dimension™ must remain with Grandpa at least five minutes, per the proprietor’s instructions, to enjoy the full comatose-Grandpa experience.”

He was staying at Crittenton Hospital, where my siblings and I were born. My grandmother, Mary Jane, was already in the small waiting area down the hall from Grandpa’s room. Decades ago these two were married but now Grandma was merely Grandpa’s best friend, closest confidante, primary caretaker, and emergency contact. She liked it better that way. 

My mom told her, “So, Brad’s gonna have a little time alone in there.”

Grandma nodded as if she’d expected this and led me into Grandpa’s room where she alerted him to my presence:

“RAYMOND?” she shouted in a way that sounded angry. “BRAD’S HERE TO SEE YOU.” 

Despite being yelled at, Grandpa’s sleeping, open-mouthed face did not change. Grandma left as I approached his bed. I was surprised to find he’d become gaunt, his face sparsely decorated with gray whiskers. He looked, I must say, pretty awesome. More like an aging art dealer or novelist than the hardy plumber he was all his life. 

He slept peacefully. And I stood there. What exactly this moment was supposed to be charged with, I could not say. Unlike my sister, I have never dabbled in mysticism, nor did I believe in God anymore. I was beginning to suspect that she’d felt God in this room, and maybe that’s what I was meant to feel. Typical Brianne: it was a big God thing all along. Well, I did not feel God’s presence. Only a creeping longing to leave, anxiety about turning out like this man, and an eagerness to return to my sister and tell her I didn’t feel a damn thing standing in that room and had no idea what she’d been babbling about. Or maybe I’d go the other way with it and tell her my experience with Grandpa was more profound than hers, more life-changing than she could ever fathom. 

“No, no, it wasn’t even a God thing,” I’d tell her. “It was bigger than God. No, smaller than God. Or, like, so far from God that not even God would get what I’m talking about right now. It was almost Satanic. You wouldn’t understand, probably, but I think Grandpa might be some kind of ancient demonic prince!”

I was about to say goodbye when two nurses entered. They said they had to do something to Grandpa now. They had to put a tube in him to drain the built-up mucus he was unable to dispense with on his own. 

I offered to leave.

“No, it’s alright,” one said. “Only takes a minute, you can stay.” 

Oh, good.

They got to work. The tube, which was connected to a machine, went in Grandpa’s mouth and down his esophagus. Or was it his trachea? As I stood there trying to remember if it’s the trachea or the esophagus, a nurse flicked the switch on the machine. A grinding noise revved up, and Grandpa’s face tightened into a fist of pain. 

And then, miraculously, he spoke. Brianne was right; if something moved him enough, he could verbally respond.

“You fuckin’ bitches!” he cried. “Jesus Christ, oh God, you goddamn bitches.” His eyes remained closed.

“Yeah, tell us about it,” the older nurse said. The younger one remained silent but she too was unfazed.

Myself, I was fazed. This guy was supposed to be in a coma, for starters. That means no talking. Now he was talking, and not only talking, but spewing utter vileness, the likes of which I’d never imagined could issue from his lips. Being an intensely religious man, he never said “fuck,” “bitch,” and certainly not “goddamn.” My sister told me that when the Twin Towers fell she watched the footage on TV with Grandpa and heard him say, “Oh my God.” And that was a big deal to us. Now he was throwing out “goddamns” and “bitches” like Hallelujahs. 

“Hey, whoa, Grandpa,” I said. “C’mon now.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” said the younger nurse.

“Aw, you goddamn bitches, Jesus Christ!” Grandpa said.

“I’m sorry,” I told them.

“Don’t even worry about it,” the elder nurse said. “We’ve heard it all, trust me.”

Finally they finished, turned off the machine. Grandpa chucked out a couple more “bitches,” but his curses no longer had bite to them and his pained face morphed back into a relaxed, sleeping one. It was like nothing had happened.

I went back to Mom and Grandma and told them about the machine but left out Grandpa verbally abusing the nurses. Maybe my sister experienced the same thing and she too left it out. When she said “Grandpa, you gotta wake up,” maybe he struck his leg and said, “I can’t, you bitch.” I’d never seen Grandpa experience physical pain, so maybe his tirade wasn’t out of character. But this was not a Grandpa I recognized. Maybe I liked this Grandpa better. I realized that at this point in his degeneration, he’d likely have no memory that a large chunk of his life was spent forcing his religion down other people’s throats. He probably did not have God on his mind at all now. Which, to my mind, begged the question: what had been the point of all that goddamned religion you forced down our fucking throats, bitch? 

When Grandpa began his decline, he lived alone in a condo my mom and grandma had set up for him. I visited him there once. He was giddy at having company and seemed to want to show me every little thing he owned. His TV was playing an old black-and-white film. Photographs were everywhere on the walls and tables, and every one of them apparently warranted a little presentation. The largest picture frame on his wall held a portrait of Christ. It was a lousy painting of Jesus, a shoddy job. It reminded me of a lecture he gave me on Jesus when I was a boy. I’d shown him a baseball card I was fond of. I told him it was probably worth a lot of money, being that it was a card of Michael Jordan, from his baseball year. 

“Wow,” he’d said, blatantly unimpressed with the card. “Y’know, it’s funny. Let’s say that was Jesus on that card. If you went up to someone on the street and said, ‘Hello, I just bought this Jesus card for ten dollars. Would you please give me five?’ He’d say, ‘I wouldn’t give ya five cents for it.’”

This scenario perplexed me. Why did I need to get rid of this Jesus card so badly that I was on the street asking strangers for half of what I’d spent on it? Was it just a wallet-sized photo? Because I can understand not wanting to pay five cents for that. But if Jesus came back and joined the Seattle Mariners, I bet his card would be worth quite a bit. I get the lesson now: I idolized baseball players, even shitty ones like Michael Jordan, when I should have been idolizing no one but Jesus.

I wonder how much he paid for that hideous Jesus painting.

He was always doing his Can we talk about Jesus? bit. One time I had to give an oral report on Ludwig Van Beethoven for school. Ludwig Van Beethoven, often referred to simply as Beethoven, was, if you don’t know, a pianist, a conductor, and a deaf person. I covered all this in my report. My mother and grandmother wanted me to perform the presentation for them, as I told them I had crushed it in class that afternoon. Grandpa was there, though he was not clamoring to hear the report like the ladies were. He sat stoically through it, showing no emotional response to the story of Ludwig Van Beethoven. Deaf piano players impressed him even less than ex-basketball-playing baseball players.

I finished to delighted applause from Mom and Grandma. But Grandpa was just sitting there, a sour, dissatisfied look on his face, as if there were much, much more to the story. With him, there always was. 

“What about Jesus?” he asked. 

“What?” all of us said. 

“Well, we’ve spent an entire five minutes talking about Beethoven. Why can’t we give the same amount of time to Jesus?” I was still standing up in front of the three of them, wondering if I should acknowledge this audience request and wax a bit about Jesus for the fans. 

“Dad,” my mom said. 

“It’s a school project,” Grandma said. “He didn’t do a report on Jesus. It was about Ludwig Van Beethoven.”

Still, he was unsatisfied, and was in a bad mood for the remainder of the evening.

Being there with him in his condo all those years later, standing in front of that portrait, I was waiting for him to cede our remaining time together to Jesus. He gestured at the painting, as if he were going to say something about it, but then a photograph caught his eye across the room and he went to it. I followed.

“This is my daughter,” he said, showing me a picture of my mom. 

“Yep,” I said encouragingly. “She is.”

“Beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

“And this,” he said, picking up another photo, “is my son, Jack.” 

“Yes, good old Uncle Jack.”

“This is my other son, Rip.”

“Yes, good old Uncle Rip.”

His eyes took on a vague sadness. “Rip is my son,” he said, “and… and he’s gay.”

“I know.”

“Oh…” he said, relieved, like he could finally talk about this with someone. “I could have killed him.” 

The story of my Uncle Rip coming out to Grandpa is a big one in our family, one I’ve heard over and over and told other people over and over, never sure I have the details right. So, I’ll just say that Rip definitely came out, Grandpa definitely didn’t like it, and they haven’t been in contact since the late 1970s. Now here was Grandpa talking about Rip, something I would have anticipated even less than him referring to nurses as “fuckin’ bitches.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m really glad you didn’t kill him. We love Rip.”

He looked at the photo again, but mercifully a nearby, non-Rip photo called out to him, he put Rip’s down, and his somber mood lifted. 

I know who I blame: Jesus. God. All those guys. If Grandpa had never become obsessed with the Lord, he wouldn’t have cared so much about Rip being gay. Sure, he may not have loved it, but he wouldn’t have feared for Rip’s damnation to the point that he had to threaten him with a bat. 

That day in his car, when he told me no one would give me five cents for a Jesus card, he was taking me to the mall for my birthday, a yearly tradition between him and his grandkids. In exchange for providing him with some quality grandkids time, we’d get to spend one hundred of his dollars. He would not let us stop shopping until we’d spent all one hundred. Sometimes this was surprisingly difficult to do, and after settling on a thirty-dollar t-shirt and some X-Men cards, you wanted to ask him if you could get the rest in cash. No dice: keep shopping. 

That day I bought a microphone with a speaker built into it. You press a button on the mic, a hip-hop beat starts, and you can rap into the mic over the beat. Fun. It didn’t cost a hundred dollars so I had to supplement it with lots of basketball cards and shirts. On the ride home Grandpa and I took turns rapping into the mic, meaning we said the word “yo” a lot, followed by whatever we felt like saying. 

“Yo, I’m Grandpa and I love my grandson Bradley, yo.”

“Yo, I’m Brad and I love to rap, yo yo yo.” 

I told Grandpa that he and I should start a rap duo. I pictured us on the album cover, our backs to the camera, hats and jeans on backward like Kris Kross. It was fun to picture Grandpa in this way. I suggested we call ourselves the Rapsters. It’s possible I said “Raptors,” referring to the genus of theropod that not only ruled the prehistoric age but, with the Toronto Raptors’ recent formation and the Jurassic Park franchise in full swing, ruled the 90s as well. Grandpa was tickled by this idea. He laughed and laughed, told me how great I was, couldn’t believe I’d said something so smart, so clever.

At home, my parents asked how the shopping went. Grandpa said we’d had a ball. I showed them my rap microphone. Grandpa started laughing, his eyes bright and shining, and said, “Wait ’til you hear this, Cindy. This kid’s so smart. Bradley said him and I should start a rap group called ‘The Rapture.’” 

My parents smiled nervously. “He did, huh?” 

“It’s from the Bible! Jesus is gonna come back and decide who gets to be with Him in Heaven. And it’s called The Rapture. And that’s what Bradley said we should call our rap group. Ha, can you believe that! Gosh, what a good kid. He’s smart, he’s really smart.”

I decided to let him have that one. My dad grimaced while my mom said, “Ha ha, glad you guys had fun.” And I stood there with my dumb microphone that broke two weeks later. 

When Grandpa left, I told my dad that on the way to the mall, Grandpa had said something about him: that he wasn’t sure Dad would go to heaven. Dad didn’t go to church, he wasn’t a man of God, and it’s not easy for someone like that to get into heaven. 

“Well, I think my dad will go to heaven,” I’d replied. 

“I dunno, Bradley,” Grandpa’d said, warningly. “I dunno.”

Dad said he didn’t want me spending time alone with Grandpa anymore.  

From then on Grandpa gave us cards with checks in them, and this was a relief. Of course, I am older now and I recognize that all of this Jesus talk came from Grandpa’s deep, desperate love for us all. He could not help but express his love in this terribly misguided way. I feel sad for what it cost him: a relationship with Rip, shopping trips with his grandkids. A small and probably stupid part of me even thinks that if he’d read a book other than the Bible occasionally, his mind might have stayed sharp. But surely this is only to give myself false hope that I might not get dementia myself one day. 

Grandpa has been dead for a few years now. He died of conditions related to COVID-19. I was living in Australia and could not attend his funeral. Last time I saw him was Christmas 2018. He was in an aged care home where my mom visited him almost daily, and I was looking forward to going with her.  

We sat in hard chairs around a table surrounded by other elderly folks. My mom brought Grandpa paper cups of coffee with powdered cream which he gulped down, and he happily ate the pureed spinach a nurse brought him. His attention mostly wandered, but at times he’d lock eyes with me and appear mesmerized, like a baby who can’t stop staring. He kept trying to say something to me: “You’re so… you’re so…” but he couldn’t get there. I think it was going to be a compliment. The best thing about the visit was watching my mom with him. She loved him so much, and he loved her when he could remember her, probably even when he could not, and I liked watching them smile and laugh at each other and not have to say anything. I felt a strange heaviness in the room — a calm, welcome heaviness, something I’d never felt in Grandpa’s presence before. Again, not God. Maybe the true absence of God, at last.