Today was my grandpa Wayne’s funeral.
Afterward, we all gathered at the house. As the crowd started to dwindle, I walked through the house from one room to the next. Looking. Looking at details I’d never noticed before. What kind of pen sat by the notepad by the chair. What he used for a bookmark. What odd little trinkets made their way to the bottom of odd little jars on the bookshelf. I looked at the art that had hung on the walls for my entire life and the teacups in the glass hutch in the hallway. I snooped.
Honestly, I didn’t know my grandpa very well. Maybe nobody every really knows anyone else. But of all the kids and grandkids, there are many others who knew him better.
You learn a lot about people after they die. People talk about the good they did when no one was looking. It’s kind of beautiful, really. And while it’s heartwarming to hear all the good things, I also appreciate the real things. The clutter of a desk that never got cleaned up. The books with a bookmark only a few pages in that never got finished. You get to know someone in a different way when you walk through the real-ness of their lives, their house, their things.
Maybe it seems crude to walk through someone’s house and snoop. But part of me felt like it was my last chance. To know him. To know him differently than I had for so long.
And the house that I had spent time in as a child. The toys, the yard, the decorations… The things I had walked past without ever looking. Without ever really seeing.
Soon the house will change. It has already begun changing in his absence. It will no longer be the place I remember. I wished on the drive home that I had taken more pictures. This is the only one I took. A quote inside a bible that his mother gave him when he was 9 in 1944.
“Whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.”