It was late August when he died- he simply faded away in his bed, a vibrant jokester full of insight and laughter reduced to a frail pile of bones. It had become obvious when he began having trouble remembering things, so they prescribed medicine for Alzheimer's and conducted a series of tests. He had continued to swim at the "Y" across the street and write poetry, as he always had but he began to lose weight. The doctors believed it was just the medicine and his swimming regimen which he had just begun. Not until the very last days of his life did we find that he had pancreatic cancer, incurable at that stage.

We all gathered in the house, clouded with imminent death and awkward conversation we would visit him and chat, but he seemed to be a different person, my grandfather without the jokes, stories and adjectives. He was a poet through and through, and he published his last poem the day before he died, the day after I had left. He had written over nine thousand poems in his retirement; odes to family and friends; fellowship and solitude. His last poem was nonsensical and confusing, death had not only stripped him of his body but also his imagination.

A nurse would come and check on him daily and every day people would come with food, and stay and tell stories and talk to him, but as the food piled higher my grandfather still died. My grandmother would bake and cook, and entertain everyone who passed by, an attempt to keep her mind off of her dying husband. My father sat at his head talking to him and patting his sweaty brow with a cloth, while I sat in the kitchen. The house was mostly quiet and lonely, this feeling was only interrupted by the doorbell or the phone; visitors with more food.

We were destined to the beach the very next day and before I left I served him his last shot of scotch, one could call it his dying request to me. We recieved word the next morning and drove close to 17 hours in a span of three days, from the beach to Charlottesville and from Charlottesville to Charlotte stopping only to shop for suits and shoes.

We sang and read poems at his funeral, all laid out before he died. And we spread his ashes in a garden, and left a bottle of scotch and a book of Robert Burns under the plauque with his name on it.

Farewell
can not elicit full feeling from my
tenure; can say I tried to be ready;
mother died, sea was crossed, I was steady;
but without wife, granchild, I could not cry;
let me tell you that I love you: those dead,
those taken ill, those driven by thier life;
and those who seem to have lived through strife;
I think i have been honest in your stead;
neither misery, nor woe, could rob your joy;
is not your life in this your past year, yours,
your own one fullest, your most heuristic,
do we not have friends elsewhere: home, employ,
but do we not have feeling for seniors,
we happy few, right into the mystic.

EWM 12/5/2000