Junior, Vol. I

Saturday night, at about 6:45, my grandfather died. His name was Arthur James Isbell, Jr., but his parents, siblings, and other relatives called him Junior. His colleagues in careers from roughneck to teacher to cattleman called him Izzy. His children and wife called him Dad. All of us grandchildren called him Pop.

Interestingly, my younger brother and I, and one aunt, were with him as he died. I had never literally watched someone take his last breath; I don't recommend it.

Interestingly, my father was not at the hospital when Pop died. He'd spent the entire previous night with Pop - keeping vigil, talking to his father (though Pop hadn't been conscious for days), making sure the nurses did their jobs - and had planned to spend Saturday night with him as well. (That's my dad: Always taking the hardest assignment so no one else has to.) I had never called a parent on the phone to say your father's gone; I don't recommend it.

Interestingly, as my brother and I watched our aunt cry, and watched as the attending nurse checked for vital signs and officially confirmed what we all knew ten minutes earlier, the first comment any of us made about Pop was this: "You know, what we should do is turn on the television, crank the volume as loud as it will go...just to [annoy] everyone else on this floor; it's what Pop would have wanted."

See...Pop was (in)famous for the volume of his television. Neighbors joked that when the Cowboys played, they could work in the yard and still keep up with the game. If you didn't know Pop, you'd think he was just hard of hearing, and that he needed the volume so high just to hear the game. But if you knew Pop, you'd know that whatever pretense of deafness he made, he could hear well enough to catch even the softest whisper of a comment he didn't like. When he was angry with you, or when you said something that represented an opportunity for him to call down the thunder on you...the man could hear through walls. Pop didn't strain the speakers on his television because he couldn't hear; he turned up the TV so loud for the twin purposes of a) chasing any conversation from the room and b) generally annoying whomever was within earshot of it. Pop pumped the volume to be mean. He was infamous for that as well.

See...Being mean is what Pop did; it was his passion. Several of his seven grandchildren claim to have been his least favorite, claim to be the one he hated most, claim to be the recipient of the worst of his disappointment, of his derision, of his damnation. (Of course, the others are wrong; I'm convinced he was most awful to me.) Though my brother had his own time in Pop's crosshairs, perhaps he alone remembers the balance of his memories with Pop with positive connotations: feeding cattle, talking about grass and rain, driving him to the barber shop, or to look at goats. Yet it was my brother who suggested the television prank in the first moments after Pop's death.

See...the best memories of Pop were of his being mean: He once took away a pocket knife he'd given me as a reward for making straight "A"s on a report card, because my math grade the next report card was a "B". As I sat in my aunt's home and listened to my father and his sisters make plans for Pop's funeral, all the stories told, all the memories shared, all the 'laughter at the good times' that you'd expect to be shared by a family in bereavement, were about terrible, no good, very bad things Pop had said and done to them over the years (some as recently as last week). When one of my aunts suggested that the phrase "loving and beloved father, grandfather, and great grandfather" be included in the tombstone text, even my father - Pop's only son and most dutiful servant - said with a chuckle, "Let's not get carried away."

The memories felt and articulated in the first hours after his death - this man called Junior, Izzy, Dad, Pop - were not what you'd expect...what you'd want...what you'd hope for after your own death. The memories we shared in those first several hours after Pop's death were of hurt. Perhaps what we all felt most was regret...not of what we had not done or said to or for him, but of what he had not done or said to or for us; what we regetted was that none of us in the end remembered a tender moment, a kind word, a look of pride. His legacy, at least in those first moments and hours after his death, was one of regret that none of us ever earned his approval, his satisfaction, his love.

I don't recommend it.

This is Volume I; stay tuned...