George Heller was foremost a loving man, a quality that I believe pushed him to become a supportive husband, a caring father and an earnest worker. At the age of eight, his father died of a rare heart condition, leaving him in a poor environment, with a mother frequently described in my household as a nasty alcoholic. Born in 1926 in Long Beach, California, he lived through the Great Depression, a Kamikaze bombing, the severe damaging of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, and a devastating work injury to his legs that left him with a permanent disability. He lived a good and honest life, never reaping the benefits he deserved.

            

     My grandfather also possessed odd qualities. As a child, he treated me as though I was significantly older. While most grandfathers frequently hug or kiss their grandkids, mine extended his hand in a formal yet loving fashion. Each use of his iron grip was accompanied by a penetrating eye contact that seemed to create a connection between us.  It was as though he was trying to tell me

that he saw something he liked inside me; something that he wanted to extract because he believed it to be promising.

 

     A sudden call. The moment everything changes. The feeling of cold hands gripping at the bottom of my heart. And then the drive to the hospital, that funny drive; remembering things I didn’t know still existed. Buying a car together, despite one of us only being three years old. Running toward the metallic, dark green sedan shouting, “Grandpa, this one!” Snap back to reality. I’m looking for police officers at every turn, glancing at the speedometer, approaching yellow lights and bracing for them to turn red.

The reflective elevator doors closed. I could now see how disheveled my suit had become during my drive, one white tail from my shirt hanging over the fly of my suit pants. The pale pink color of the elevator walls, clearly suited for elderly eyes, was also visible and provided an odd calming sensation.

 

     After navigating the hospital maze, I entered room 238. I saw my family sitting around a bed. My father, eyes sunken, had spent the night with my grandfather. My mother allowed tears to flow freely. My great aunt stood, hands rested upon her sister’s shoulders, a soft loving touch. Her eyes reflected a sense of worry. And there was my grandmother at the foot of the bed. She looked as though nothing was wrong, as though my grandfather was simply sleeping, as though his dreams were simply memories of their past sixty years together. Moving closer, my attention focused on the bed. My grandfather lay still, expending his final moments in a familiar way.

 

     Snoring is a common phenomenon in the Heller household. My father has snored, deafeningly loud, throughout my life. Of course, my father inherited it from his father, who famously used this talent to wake the neighbors on a hot night in 1967. Apparently, they claimed there were wolves howling in the Hellers’ home. In reality, the noise was simply due to a slightly cracked window in the bedroom of a man who benefited from a deep slumber.

 

     The sound chilled the room. A breath of air with no meaning. Not like the breath his lungs formed when he played football. Nor during the hours that he floated in the water after fighting flames aboard his sinking carrier ship. These were this man’s last breaths. Though I knew he was in his final moments, that he could hear us and knew we’d be with him as he faded away, it still felt as though he was already gone. He would never again offer me cash, as he called it. I would never hear the clicking of his cane against the stiff, sticky linoleum of their kitchen. The cold hands began to fill my chest again, inching toward my heart, their weight pulling downward.

 

     I had the urge to reach out and touch his motionless body. It felt like an opportunity to pull his soul back. But I understood that I had to let him go. Still, I reached out, touched him, and hoped I could convince him to stay.

            

     It would be another three hours before my grandfather died. My mother cried, my father told stories of a man he truly loved and admired, and my grandmother continued to search the air surrounding my grandfather’s face for signs of possible recovery. He was pronounced dead at 6:10 pm on August 11, 2009.

     

     At the moment he took his last breath, and I gasped quietly alongside him, I felt death. I felt what it was like to have someone depart, permanently. Worse, this feeling was more powerful because a loved one inflicted it. Seeing the tears in everyone’s eyes, knowing there was nothing more we could do, I realized my understanding of life had changed.

 

     So why is it that people presume I haven’t felt this type of loss? Maybe the cause is the idea of permanence, the thought of an everlasting state. Life is full of ever-changing moments that inspire waves of emotions and responses. But in death there are no emotions and there are certainly no responses. The only thing that remains is existence. Though the persona may depart, it still existed, still influenced others. Loss is always viewed negatively because it is inevitable. But in a way, it can actually be a positive thing. The reason we feel loss is because some presence has influenced our decisions and affected our emotions in a way that has helped to create our own persona. The stronger the feeling of loss, the greater the influence the person had. So if loss, or death, is inevitable then it should be reveled in, because feeling our loved ones die doesn’t just give their lives purpose and meaning, but ours as well.