Grandaddy (1931 - 2023)

I said goodbye to my grandfather a couple weeks ago, on the first Sunday of the NFL season. He passed away peacefully a couple days later.

That Sunday morning, we sat there, just the two of us in the hospital room, talking. We talked about some of our adventures together over the years, trips we took as kids to Texas, Nova Scotia, New Orleans, California, and a two-week cross-country trek in 2006 from San Diego back home to Pennsylvania, when he and my grandma got a speeding ticket in New Mexico. He talked about the trips he used to take with his grandfather as a teenager, in his fancy Plymouth Coupe from the 1940s with the split windshield, to Indiana and South Dakota.

I asked him what he was the most proud of. He didn’t hesitate…

“Probably my football career!” He announced at first. “I enjoyed it. I don’t mean to brag, but I was good at it.”

I think this is the first I ever heard Grandaddy, as we called him, admit to bragging in the 38 years I knew him. My grandfather was a proud man, but always with a reserved humility - about his work ethic, about his service in the Army in Korea, about his trips to all seven continents, about the countless lives he influenced as a proud public school educator.

But he never bragged, which is why the remark makes me smirk a little. It was out of character in a funny way.

He has plenty of reason to brag about his football career - he played in the Blue/Gray Bowl game, coached by Penn State’s Rip Engel. At Shippensburg University, he was Co-Captain of an undefeated 1952 football season. Eventually, he was enshrined into the school’s 1st Athletic Hall of Fame. Then, at the school’s spring game this year, the team invited him back to pay tribute - an honor that both tickled him and deeply touched him at 91 years old. According to my grandma, he even went down to the basement at his house and pulled out his old letterman sweater from college for the occasion.

That Sunday morning in the hospital, he continued, talking about how proud he was of his family.

“A great wife, great daughters, great grandchildren," he said through tears. We were both crying at that point. I told him how proud we were of him too.

We cried until we laughed about some family inside jokes, which leads us to the picture at the top of this post from a couple years ago…

There are hundreds of pictures of us together, at all ages, in places all around the world. All wonderful memories! But this one at the top, from a family dinner in my grandparents' kitchen, is life with Grandaddy at the core. Laughter. Grinning ear to ear. The joy of just being with each other, with no particular punchline except the giggles, twinkles, and smiles of a precious moment in time shared together.

It deeply hurts how finite those moments are, but that feeling?

That’s anything but. That’s infinite.

Today we gathered as a family in Pennsylvania to celebrate his life with so many others from the community who loved him dearly. So many people I haven’t seen in ages. Many who said they’ve kept up with our lives from afar, via my mom’s Facebook posts. They talked about teaching with him, playing sports with him, traveling with him, being neighbors with him, and learning from him.

Per his instructions, we sang Amazing Grace, just like they sang on the Windjammer ships he liked to sail on, then laid him to rest in a valley meadow, on a quiet rolling hillside overlooking the Tuscarora Mountains. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and it’s about as peaceful of a Pennsylvania countryside as you can picture, complete with sylvan woods in the distance and a blue and white sky from fluffy patchwork clouds.

I’m just going to miss him so much. But I also have a feeling I’ll never truly stop learning from him.

Our lives are just a ribbon of time on the breeze, colored by the love and laughter of the people that mean the most to us.

Tell your people, whoever they are, that you love them.

Rest easy, Grandaddy.