thejakers

It was 365 days ago, around the time in the morning when I am writing this that I received a phone call from my mom.

“Jake,” she said somberly. “Grandpa died last night.”

“I’m coming over,” I said.

Putting the phone down, I quietly got dressed. Holding back the tears, I told my wife what had happened and that I was going to be back in a little while. My three-year old son, Liam, was still sleeping in the other room.

As I drove over to my grandfather’s home, I quietly began to cry. Seattle was experiencing one of the worst snow storms in its history. It was very cold out, and I remember the odd sensation of having hot tears run down my face even as I was shivering uncontrollably, waiting for the car’s heater to do its magic.

I pulled up into the gravel driveway of the house that held so many wonderful memories for me, knowing that this would be the last time I’d ever set earthly eyes on my grandpa. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never experienced death this close. It was a surreal experience to walk through the front door and see him laying there, mouth slightly open, stiff and lifeless.

The time of mourning was very hard for the family. The onset of death, so quick and unexpected. In such a short time, joy turned to sorrow, and the celebration of our Savior’s birth turned into the reality of sin’s consequences.

It was by God’s grace that I was even in Seattle last year. In the summer we were building our first home here in Arizona, and had planned to experience our first Christmas in that home. But as we moved closer to the holidays, I began to feel the importance of coming back home to Seattle to celebrate the holiday with my family.

So we changed our plans.

Grandpa, I think, was holding on just for that. The McElroy family gathered on Christmas day for a great celebration. Grandpa was healthy, alert, and taking in the joy of being with four generations. He was a true patriarch.

It wasn’t but a day or two after that wonderful time that things went down hill quickly.

By December 29th, he was dead.

During this time, I was reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. I’d like to believe it wasn’t by accident. In that book, Wright speaks to the hope we all have as Christians in the bodily resurrection of humankind and the redemption of all creation. I took great encouragement from his deep insight into the hope we all have in Christ. And it was comforting to know that one day, our family will once again be together, bodily, celebrating not as just four generations, but as a multitude of generations.

God knew this would happen. He knew my family and I needed to be in Seattle last year. For that gift of providence, I’m eternally grateful. I am also grateful that Grandpa was a believer. Today, he is with our Lord, in a place of no sickness, pain, or death. And one day, we will all be reunited together for a joyful time of celebration once again.

This year, as we observe the first memorial of grandpa’s death, I’m reminded of the cycles of life. My wife is nine months pregnant, and we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of our second son. Last year we mourned death. This year we will be celebrating life. It’s funny how, despite our best efforts at times, life just keeps on marching forward. The realities of death and life, continue to confound us despite our best efforts to conquer them.

I wish my grandpa was still alive to see the arrival of his second great-grandchild. But the reality is that he is still alive, just not with us in the present. And while he won’t be there when my son arrives. He will one day hold him in his arms and give him a great big hug.

Grandpa, I miss you and love you. Say hi to the big guy for me.

The first anniversary of my grandpa’s death is fast approaching. For the last nine months, his ashes sat on the mantle of the house that he lived in for over fifty years with his wife, whom he’d been married to even longer than that, packed into a box the size of my fist. This month those ashes were spread around the foundation of that house, around the yard, and out into the back woods. A sprinkle here. A sprinkle there.

And this makes good sense. During his life, my grandpa poured himself into his home. He expanded it with new rooms, built an garage, constructed a sun room (in Seattle no less!), painted again and again, rearranged the landscaping, busted walls, rebuilt walls, and continually remade his surroundings as he continually remade himself.

A week before his death, grandpa, Liam, and I enjoyed a few hours together. I wasn’t supposed to be in Seattle that Christmas, but God sovereignly had other plans.

It was that house that I used to ride my bike down to at five in the morning, speeding on East View Ridge Drive, down onto the steep, exhilarating incline of Olympic Avenue, and into the gravel drive with a slam of my breaks and an epic skid only an eight year old boy could appreciate, giddy with expectation as I prepared to caddy for my grandpa at one of the local golf courses. It was in the warm kitchen, smelling of coffee and melted butter, that I sat down to eat the smiley face pancakes, a McElroy tradition. It was in the warmly lighted family room, where we sat around the dinner table and talked into the night, telling long and rambling jokes and playing board games. It was that house where my mom, my uncles and aunts, me, and my cousins grew up. Good memories and bad, that house that was his and ours.

I was not able to make it up for the spreading of grandpa’s ashes, and in a way I’m glad. I paid my respects, kissing his cold forehead for the last time in the living room of the very same house in which he lived and died on that frosty December morning almost a year ago. But part of me wishes that I could have been there, to see just one last time the remains of the man I loved, even if they fit in a Chinese take-out box instead of one of his spring-fresh laundered v-neck undershirts. To gather as a family one last time around a man who had been a center of our life for so long. But in the end, it is his memory that sustains my love, not ashes. And those still burn strong.

Yet, there are days when I miss him terribly. Today is one of those days.

Rest in peace, Ronald McElroy. Rest in peace, grandpa.

This week I embarked on a massive email in-box cleansing and deleted thousands of messages going all the way back to 2007. The impetuous for this endeavor is the fact that I’m leaving my job in two weeks to focus on writing and editing full-time. As I went through my old emails, little snapshots of the past, I came across the emails with my mom about Christmas plans for this past holiday.

My grandpa died just a few days after Christmas. I’m glad that I got to see him one last time, and that by God’s providence I made the trek to Seattle with my wife and son for the Christmas holiday. But it was strange going through those emails beginning in early December, filled with joy, hope, and expectation centered around our family gathering, and then in the space of literally minutes going through emails from late December and early January, filled with grief, pain, and confusion, centered around the death of my grandpa and the details for his memorial.

Technology is a weird thing. Ten years ago, I would never have had an experience quite like that. Nor would I be blogging about it. Yet, here we are, engaging in this medium, not even sure how it really effects us mentally or emotionally.

Anyway, I wrote an essay about my grandpa, which I read at the memorial a couple months ago. I’ve been asked to share it by a few folks, and my email project inspired me to go ahead and post it. It’s long. No need to read it through, or at all for that matter, but at least it’s here. A digital relic for a dying age:

Brand My Memory by Jacob Johnson

You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.
-    Annie Dillard, “How to Live”

Personally, I’m a bit of a bull-shitter myself.
- The cartoon bull on a poster in Grandpa’s garage

Death, as we know, is the great equalizer. It is a cold shower, a sobering and shocking dousing, at best vaguely expected, at worst a horrible surprise. Like all good shocks, it get’s you thinking. What is right and important? How is life to be lived? Often it is as introspective as it is objective. The experience of mourning and remembering and wishing and hoping is a personal one, as much about the lover as the loved one.

And that’s ok. We need to push and pull, laugh and cry, to accept that we lost more than just a person, but a part of ourselves. And we ache and we hurt, and we smile and we cry as we reminisce and run into tender memories at every corner. This, I suspect will last for quite some time.

And death carries with it great mythos. My, oh my, it is a heady topic. A frosty glass of porter on a cold winter’s day. To be dwelt on, savored, sipped. It must be explored, not flown over. Pushed and prodded. Search out its corners; put your hands down the crevices. As Shakespeare said, it is the undiscovered country.

We don’t know what happens after death. We have our ideas. But in the end they are speculation, a veiled realization – a hope to which we are attached like a lifeline. The only certainty we have about death is that it happens. And it will one day happen to us, and to those we love.

Still, we try to forget this inconvenient truth. We live our lives in the illusion of permanence. And for good reason we go about acting as if this ultimate reality doesn’t exist Otherwise we would be paralyzed with fear and contempt, or we would waste our lives in revelry. Instead, we work hard for whatever we believe will make life worth living: wealth, fame, family, or God – or some combination thereof. And we live, quite happily, in the illusion that these things will be a part of us, with us, forever.
But every so often there is an interruption. Things we deemed reliable fail us. Surprise events breach our walls of expectation. Life throws us a curveball. These are often minor things, quickly forgotten. A light switch not working, or the cable going out. These, we think, are flukes – errors in an otherwise wholly reliable program. Surely, they are not the norm because they are random and happen so little – to us.

So, we choose not to focus on these interruptions. Instead, we work hard. We build a better light bulb. We invent digital cable. We get a promotion. We improve and invent and push and strive. We seek control and grasp sand.
Yet, impermanence is not a fluke. It is the norm. The better light bulb burns out. The union job gets phased out. The cable gets cut – usually during the football game. The flower withers. The tree falls. Lakes evaporate. Rivers run dry. And people you love most pass on.

But impermanence is, of course, not the whole story. It is only half. There is also permanence. There is love, laughter, family. There is always a new light bulb to be found. The cable comes back on. You get a new job. A new tree grows. New lakes form. Rivers carve out new winding ways. And the memories of those you love remain, and the bits of soul they planted in you are passed on to others – your children or your friends – to those that know that you are not a whole but a sum of parts.

Tonight as I was eating dinner, I used a torn piece of bread to scoop food onto my fork, and I got to thinking how I’d seen grandpa do that a million times. Now I was doing it. Sometimes I’ll catch myself telling stories like grandpa does, long, drawn out stories that you know have a punch line, but you can’t guess what it is or how you’re going to get to it; or I’ll see myself in the mirror and catch a phantom drift across my face, a merging of the past with the present, when the Irish blood flowing in my veins is magnified, and all I’d need would be a sailor suit to be him. When I smoked Camels, the brand he smoked for over sixty years, I caught myself putting the tip of my tongue out to wet my lips and putting the cigarette to my lips, my forefinger and thumb cradling the filter, the rest of my fingers raised slightly in the air, holding in the smoke and surveying the world around me, knowing I’m not perfect, but that I’m here; I’m living.

See. Little bits of soul.

And then there are the memories.

Prior to his death, they would often float lazily like a piece of driftwood into my consciousness and settle on the sand of my mind to be discovered unexpectedly, a long forgotten moment of joy. And I would pause. And dwell. And cherish.
Now, after his death, they come on like a flood.

I remember smiley-face pancakes at five am. I remember the bed bugs song, and the whiskey river. I remember long drawn out stories – but not the stories themselves. I remember warmth and generosity and toughness. I remember finding golf balls in the rough, teeing off when the marshal wasn’t looking, stories about his pal Brown, V-neck sweaters, the way his shoulders shook when he laughed, the firmness of his handshake, the fresh smell of his clothes, and the age spots on his face. I remember his goodness and gentleness. I remember him as a man I want to one day be like.

I will say this. Grandpa’s death has taught me something about life. I’ll never forget returning to my mom’s house after seeing grandpa’s still body, cold like the snow on the Everett streets, having kissed his forehead for the last time, the hot tears traveling down my cheeks, and the staleness of the air still burning in my nostrils; how my son, Liam, with joy and expectation on his face ran into my arms, and told me about his morning adventures, blissfully ignorant and totally enthralled with me.
And I thought, this is a moment grandpa would appreciate.

And as I bent over, picked Liam up, and whispered in his ear, “I sure missed you. You are my favorite,” I felt a joy unspeakable enter my soul, and the weight of the day was gone. In that moment grace and peace, the very presence of God, entered into the room. And I knew my grandpa Mac wasn’t gone. His legacy lived on, in me and in you.  In the everyday actions we take, and in the way in which we approach the world.

I always thought that Liam would learn all the jokes and songs and stories from the source, from early morning breakfasts and after-dinner table talk. I assumed that he would know the man. I had comfortably settled into permanence. And now that impermanence has settled itself in the house, taken off his shoes, and peeked in the fridge, maybe even rearranged a few pieces of furniture, I’ve reassessed what it will mean for my son to know my grandfather – his great-grandfather, in more ways that one.
Sure we have pictures, and yes, there are videos. But how will he really know him? Through me. In the way that I love, talk, share, and teach. In the faces I make, the way I too say, “Hey,” loudly and boisterously when Liam walks into the room, the things I laugh at, and the jokes I tell. By personally being a bit of a bull-shitter myself. Liam may not recognize these things as my grandfather, but I will. And I will see those things in my son as he grows. Little pieces of soul.

We are the permanence of those who have poured into us. We are the living, breathing relics of our ancestors. We do not pass on; we pass forward. A branded memory.

Thanks be to God.