I’ve been scanning these old 8mm recordings I inherited from my grandfather, and it’s been a rather distressing experience. It’s the combination of extreme nostalgia and resurrected regret, and the hardest part has been all the memories of my grandfather himself. We had this complicated, shifting relationship that changed for the worse as we got older, in particular, as he degenerated in terrible, tragic ways. He was an important part of my childhood, but when he died in 1989, I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. Yet now, as I see these old recordings, I miss him and wish I could see him again, and also wish I could have done something to prevent his self-destruction.
One constant reminder of our connection is our name. I was named after my grandfather. I was his first grandchild. Strangely, no one called me “Paul” when I was born — I was PZ. I didn’t learn my full name until I was 5 and was sent off to school with a nametag that stated my proper name, and told that I have to answer to “Paul” or I might miss the bus to take me home, which sounded like a terrible threat. After that, my family started calling me “Little Paul” — Grandpa was Big Paul, of course — so now I was facing diminution on top of risking not being able to come home. I have always been confused about my name, my self, and my identity, and I don’t mentally attach a name to myself at all. I’m always just the bewildered narrator trying to figure out who I am.
I did not resent my grandfather at all, though. I thought he was a pretty cool guy. He served in WWII, but he did not like to talk about that at all. He’d deflect, and talk about his aspirations before the war, instead. He grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, but what he wanted to be was an architect or an engineer. He had kept a big dossier of designs and skillfully drafted plans for houses that he’d done as a high school student in the 1930s, and he kept them for his entire life, stored away in a drawer, and only brought out when I’d ask to see them. He did not get to be an architect or engineer.
His family was poor, and could only afford to send one child to college, and that was Lyla, his older sister, who went off to become a teacher. One day when I was very young, I overheard Lyla tearfully apologizing to my grandfather, saying he should have been the one to go to college, that he was the smart one with high promise (I think this was at a point in his life where it was becoming obvious that he was swirling down the drain.) That’s always stuck with me, that education is important if you want to better yourself, and my grandfather is an example of what happens if you’re denied it.
He instead went to work as a farmhand, got married to my grandmother, Nora Berg, and had a daughter, his only child, my mother, Darlene Westad. He enlisted in the army in 1944, where he was recruited as a “Skilled craneman, derrickman, hoistman, and shovelman” and was shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he drove a bulldozer and built airfields under perilous conditions. He never talked about the war, except a few times to mention the horrible conditions and barracks full of lizards and snakes. But then, most veterans don’t like to talk about the war, I’ve noticed.
Before he was mustered out, he’d moved his family out of the frigid farmlands of Minnesota to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and he joined them in 1946. He had bought a nice little house in Kent, Washington and got a job with the state highways department, and built roads in Washington state. By all accounts, it was a very good job, paid well, gave him plenty of time to indulge his hobbies of camping, fishing, and woodworking, and he built a wonderful workshop in his backyard. He taught me how to use a table saw and a lathe and a router there, and we built simple little projects together.
Once I was born and old enough, that is. One of the side effects of the location where he bought his house is that there was this big rowdy family of rogues and rascals living on the other side of the railroad tracks, about two blocks away, and one of the fellows over there eventually seduced his daughter and eloped off to Idaho with her, when she was just 16. Next thing he knew, she was pregnant, and presto, I was born in 1957. I would get hints that Grandpa did not much care for this Jim Myers guy, but the conflict was mostly soothed away, probably because he got to be a doting grandfather. And he was! He was a great and caring person when I was a child.
But then the cracks started to appear. Sometime in the 1960s, he lost the good construction job. He later got a job as a custodian for the Kent school district, and I’d sometimes help him out — I learned how to use a buffer! We kids had no idea what was going on at first, but we figured it out. For me, the light bulb moment was the day my brother and I were left with Grandpa for a while, and he shooed us out to the car and took us on a terrifying drive across town, weaving, nearly hitting a telephone pole or skidding into a ditch, until we reached a small dark establishment on the other side of town, and he told us to wait in the car while he took care of business. We waited. We waited for a long time. We eventually got out and went to the door, which said “No minors allowed”, and we crept in anyway, and there was Grandpa, slumped over a table with three empty shot glasses in front of him.
Oh yeah, Grandpa was a very soggy alcoholic.
We should have figured that out from the fact that every morning, first thing after getting up, he’d pop the top on a can of cheap beer, light up a cheap cigar, and pour the beer with great sloppy gulping sounds down his throat. Then he’d pop another. And another. Most mornings he’d be in a bleary-eyed haze by 10am. His wood shop was neglected. His relationship with our grandmother became increasingly cold and bitter. His grandchildren were sad and disillusioned, only coming by the house to see our grandmother.
Once I went off to college and eventually a career, I became the worst grandson, rarely visiting, actively avoiding him. I missed the worst of his descent, fortunately: he became verbally abusive and hostile, cursing my sisters who still tried to get together with our grandmother and help her out. He was loudly racist and misogynistic and hateful, and even threatened violence, although at that point he could barely get out of his chair to act on it. I heard all of this second hand, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the old man.
We all expected that he was well on his way to a gradual decline and death, and I was resigned to the fact that I’d someday get a call to tell me that Grandpa had a heart attack/slipped into an alcoholic coma/choked on his own vomit, but no! Fate had a cruel twist for him and was about to send him into a new Hell.
Remember the cigar? Grandpa was a non-stop, heavy cigar smoker. It made gift-giving easy, because we’d always just get him a box or two of those cheap Ben Franklin perfectos. He’d chew on those things all day long, and we collected those empty cigar boxes, which were great as pencil boxes, or places to store my dead bug collection, or bricks for building fantasy castles. Our house was full of them!
He was diagnosed with an oral cancer, and of course he neglected to do anything about it until his jaw was rotten with it. He was hospitalized, and the only thing they could do to save his life was to completely remove his jaw. I heard that my grandmother fainted when she saw him after the surgery — he looked like some zombie ghoul from EC comics. They removed one of his ribs, sculpted it, and implanted it in his hip to grow, and would later give him a reconstructed jawbone, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
He was a chronic alcoholic who hadn’t been sober in years, and now he was going to have to dry out cold turkey! He was wrecked. He had the DTs. He suffered hellishly with the combination chemotherapy and alcohol withdrawal. I, the bad grandson, didn’t go anywhere near him at this time. Other members of the family bore the burden.
He survived, and I saw him a few times in his later years. He was still sitting in the same old easy chair, but now instead of a can of beer he’d have a can of Ensure. He wasn’t cussing anyone out, because he could barely speak with this weak, toothless, chinless bridge of reconstructed bone for a jaw. He was hollowed out and empty eyed.
He later went into the hospital for further cancer treatments, got up to try to walk to the toilet, and had a heart attack and died.
Well, that was a depressing story.
At least I still remember the good grandpa who taught me how to measure and cut wood, who gave me his old drafting tools, who had a boat and took us out fishing, who every weekend would get together with his elderly parents to play cribbage with them. And who also, most relevant right now, bought an 8mm camera in the 1950s because he wanted to record memories of his family, especially his grandkids, and who taught me how to run the projector, and how to splice and repair the film. He told me I was supposed to preserve these movies for the whole family, and now I guess I am.
Hmmm, I feel you. I miss my mum. She’s still alive, mind you, but a lot of that intelligent woman has been drowned in alcohol. Even when she’s dry she’s occasionally not sure which century we’re in.
I regret that I read all of that. That was a downer.
Oh I am sorry PZ. I never knew my paternal grandfather (no great loss it seems) and lost my wonderful maternal grandfather when I was 6. Writing about him in detail in my two memoirs has helped, as I guess your account has helped you to sort out mixed feelings. It all makes your achievements even more striking!
Depressing subject, but splendid, honest story-telling.
Bravo.
Oh, I don’t regret reading it. It’s very sad and harrowing but also fraught with possibilities of what could have been. Sounds like it needed to be written, and I’m glad PZ did.
I only knew my paternal grandmother, a very stuffy, domineering woman who I only saw at Sunday dinners and who died when I was 13. My mother’s parents both committed suicide at different times before she was out of her 20’s, and I never had the courage to ask her why. I’m not sure she would have told me. One of my sisters thinks there was something very dark in the family. So sadly I have no fond memories of grandparents at all.
It’s hard when the people we love, or want to love, can’t defeat their demons.
When I’m trying to give grace to my late father, I think of the fact that he was never raised with the idea of therapy being helpful. Nobody in his life gave it the slightest bit of support, and the coping mechanisms modeled, to a one, were incredibly harmful.
When I can’t give grace to my dad I think that he should have loved me more than he loved drinking. It’s a hard place to be.
Yeah, seen that a few times. A few times too many.
Most of the people I know battling demons died of either drug overdoses or alcohol problems in their 20s.
And their friends and families, including me, did try everything to intervene and get them off the path they were on.
Nothing worked for very long.
That was beautifully written, and I found it very touching.
You don’t get to choose your family, and it’s so sad that our society doesn’t provide better access to higher education to those who also must work to survive.
My Grandfather was also a hardworking man, who did everything he could to provide for his family despite a limited education. He left school after eight grade to work, and help support his parents and many younger siblings during the depression. He farmed, and he taught himself welding and repairing any type of machinery as another income source. Later he got a Caterpiller excavator and a contract with the county to maintain some of the lesser used gravel roads in the area. My eldest son very much resembled him in both appearance, and entrepreneurial spirit.
I miss them both.
Your Grandfather would be proud to know you remembered his words, and are preserving the family history.
I hear you PZ. My father is what is called a maintenance alcoholic, which is when alcoholics maintain a certain level of drunk that more or less allows them to function day to day (decidedly less functional as time moves on). The one or two beers he always had at lunch, the scotch before dinner, followed by one or two beers, followed by an after-dinner scotch, followed by mid to late evening beers as he watched TV movies eventually morphed into “Turning Leaf wine as breakfast beverage” (or just breakfast) followed by “dead drunk asleep by noon”. Hiding all the bottles and cans behind the sofa makes his slurred and angry declarations of sobriety totally believable!
He saved the drunk driving for his retirement years.
By which I mean full on drunk and driving before 10am.
Don’t feel bad about not visiting a wildly dysfunctional addict, regardless of shared DNA. Past a certain point, a certain level of self-preservation kicks in, even if you can’t exactly put a name to it in the moment.
While I realize the timing was purely coincidental, I read this, as well as a recent post by Jude Doyle about the death of his father today. Together, they brought back some complicated feelings about men – my father included – who feel entitled to inflict their demons on the vulnerable family members they profess to love.
What you wrote is personal, but it’s also political, seeing as Vulgarmort and Hillbilly Vanilli want to take us back to the days when family members (at least the ones who couldn’t leave) had no recourse but to suffer in silence.
My grandfather went from ‘maintenance alcoholic’ in my childhood to ‘wetbrained sot’ in my teen years and young adulthood, who depended entirely on my grandmother to keep him alive. She stuck by him until his death, which is a whole ‘nother tragic story.
nomdeplume @3
I knew neither of my biological grandfathers. Paternal was estranged before I was born. I met him once as my grandmother sprung him as a surprise while we visited. Dad was not happy. There had been abuse from what I recall my dad saying. That grandmother remarried the only grandfather I knew, a bigoted Virginian who I recall sported a Confederate flag on his favorite chair. He was protective as hell of me, as I recall when a neighborhood dog bit me on a visit and all hell broke loose. He died when I was in junior high I think. They used to tease him that I had a black girlfriend. That would eventually come true much later. Take that step-grandpa from Virginia and family members who joked about that!
My maternal grandfather from the pic I’ve seen was an ornery cuss and died when my mom was young and that grandmother never remarried. She was supercool but my mom’s family was large and fractious. Fun visits. Most were stalwart Republicans except one aunt who took to heart that losing my grandfather put them on benefits and she thought others in similar circumstances should get that too regardless of background.
@13 Wow – you should write your family history….
Well you are reliving a lot of memories right now, and that will include the not-so-pleasant ones, alas.
But you are doing something good here, your relatives will thank you for all the curating you took on yourself.
The younger ones especially will have a family history ready to pore over when they’ll want to and will be grateful for that.
Do you know what actually happened to your grandfather during the war? You said that he didn’t talk about it but did others? Did you ever meet and talk to any old war buddies of his or find any records? Does anything that happened in wartime explain how he ended up?
FWIW My Grandpa was in the Australian Air Force in WW II. He lost an eye when a RADAR tower collapsed and all his friends / unit were then sent somewhere else where they were all killed. He didn’t talk about it either. Certainly not to us.
At some point, all maintenance alcoholics crash because your body will only take this much abuse.
silvrhalide
They’re all the same, aren’t they?
The scary thing is how this influenced me as a kid. My whole family were “critical drinkers”. As a kid I always thought that alcohol is what grown ups drink, because my parents and my aunt would have beer every day like it was the 1800s and water was dangerous.
My mother and I would bake and cook together, it’s one of my favourite memories, making 12 kinds of christmas cookies, making an entire birthday buffet. But when the celebration came, my mum would plead not being well. It took me until my early 30s to realise that she was just drunk. And when my sister and I finally connected the dots, my father was still in denial and it caused so much pain…
I consider myself extremely lucky that my mother cracked down on my father so strongly and so early. Dad could have turned into one of those drunkards — he was a bit of a binge drinker in his youth — but Mom almost divorced him and scared him sober. I don’t think I ever saw Mom touch a drop of alcohol her entire life.
I suspect Grandpa was the reason. She had a good bad example.
PZ@18 My two brothers and I are like your mom, PZ. We’ve never smoked or drunk alcohol because our father was a heavy smoker and drinker and we didn’t want to be like him. He was a morose drunk, wallowing in self pity about how poorly treated he had been in his life. He never physically abused my mom, but he did mentally abuse her. He mostly left us kids alone (except for THE BELT!), like he didn’t know what to do with us. He died at age 51 when I was 14.
Later, in my 30s, I attended a meeting in English for Adult Children of Alcoholics with a friend in Tokyo. It was a sobering (hic!) experience as I listened to one after another worry and fret over having to meet their alcoholic parent during the upcoming holidays. I realized maybe how fortunate I had been not to have had to deal with someone like that for my entire life (or most of it) as they had. I still sometimes wonder how he affected my life even in the short time I knew him.
The statistics on alcohol mortality seem seriously understated, as sympathetic coroners cover up family shames.
When I read that Mississippi had the lowest rate of liver-related deaths in the country, I laughed long and loudly.
@17
No doubt about it–it’s already happening. Between the statins that are the only thing currently keeping him alive and his constant drinking, he’s already lost 6-8 inches in height from loss of bone density. It’s a tossup as to whether falling down the stairs dead drunk or just coding on the sofa when the statins can’t keep up will kill him. Or his liver just finally gives out from the statins and decades of alcohol abuse. At his age he’s not going to make the transplant list.
My mother’s side of the family didn’t have a problem with alcohol but my father’s side of the family… it’s just not a party/holiday without a ton of booze. I couldn’t stand holidays with the paternal relatives, especially as a small child, with the cloud of cigarette smoke and the smell of alcohol on everyone’s breath.
@18 Your mom rocks. Mine was a massive enabler. “Cover everything up, put on a show of normalcy and success for the neighbors” was her MO.
silvrhalide
The scary thing is how much this can be hidden. For everybody else, we were the picture perfect aspiring middle class family. When the whole thing came crashing down, my aunt was completely shocked. She told me that she always thought that while they had problems, we were an example of a healthy family. For us kids it was a difficult process to understand that yeah, our mum is an alcoholic, when all our lives we thought that alcoholics were unemployed smelly people who hung out at Aldi with a beer at 9 am and not senior lab technicians.