Moments from Dismembering My Grandfather’s House
Dispatch from the Weekend
My paternal grandfather lived with us after his Alzheimer’s got too intense. This was a difficult time, but I still hold many beautiful moments. I am astounded at the seeming-cosmic reversal that I would read books to my grandfather. We read John Cage’s Silence together, and I reviewed some research for my master’s degree with him. He would make care that we were still reading Umberto Eco or not.
I want to tell you about how surreal it was to dismember his house after he passed.
While I was unemployed in 2019, my dad helped me by, as he would say, “overpaying me for a few things around the place.” This was a lesson in itself that my blessings have protected me from certain dire fates, but one of these places was his own childhood home, the place of my grandparents, and a regular visit of my childhood.
One of the unique things about this house is that it has a basement. In Southern California, that isn’t very common. But my grandpa built it. He expanded his home and added this feature. In the crawlspace of that basement was their old food storage from the sixties.
Please embrace the absurdity with me: there is no way they could have imagined, in preparing for a fallout, that there would be a day when this grandson, this nephew would dismantle their backup plan. In these tanks of rice and water, I found their full-heartened attempt to keep life safe and possible even after a world-ending event. I carried them to the trailer to dump later.
In the dining room, I found more proof of life-ending events. There were books about light therapy, new treatments, and advice on caring for someone with terminal cancer. I remember my grandma making cake in the kitchen. This is where I formed my love for yellow cake, I have no doubt. She died from breast cancer when I was a young boy. Of the few memories I have of her, I can see her exhausted at the dinner table, head in her hands. I wonder what she was thinking about. I believe this would be the foreshadow of me learning how frail life is. I carried these to the large trash can outside.
I found love letters in the books my grandparents gave each other, letters from my grandpa to grandma while he was stationed in Japan and art he brought back home. I found the Allred family seal and a description of it explaining it. As it goes, Allred means something of “Noble Counsel.” I took a picture of it. I threw it all away.
There are berry vines growing in the back. I loved snacking on them as a kid. They were always the best raspberries, and I remembered being confused why they would be empty “sometimes” and not believing my grandma’s “idea” about “seasons”.
The swing set was now broken, my old seat dripping from the rusted set. My sister and I used to rage on those things. The garden fence now only protected a patch of hard dirt under the pomegranate tree.
I would move away before this project was finished. When I came back to visit once, I saw the full work my dad put into his childhood home. The carpet was pulled, showing the original hardwood floor. The granite was slick, and the new color of the room was kind but still unwelcome to me.
I told my dad I was proud of him.
More soon,
Trevor