My Opa

As I lifted my five-year-old head from its resting place on my shoulder, I realized that the bone-jarring vibration of the pickup truck had finally stopped. I sighed and drank in the bliss of relaxation. Then, sleepy and exhausted though I was, I was still a curios young mind, and therefore had to know why the sudden stillness had occurred. I opened my heavy eyelids and remember two things. First of all, the reason I was so tired was because it was extremely late, and that we had arrived at our destination. I stirred and looked at my mother in the seat next to me. She smiled at me in the moonlight as I unbuckled my seatbelt and mumbled groggily. We had arrived at my grandparents’ house.

I hated it. Here, in Arizona, everything was hot and sticky. We had been unlucky enough to arrive right in the middle of the rainy monsoon season, and so the humidity was stifling. My family seemed excited to be there, and I wondered why. Here we were; we didn’t know anybody. We were complete strangers in a brand new town.

A few days later, I began to notice a change. My grandfather, better known to me as Opa, was still his smiling old self, but with a sadness in his eyes I had not noticed before. I saw it in my grandmother, Oma, as well. Eventually he was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph glands. At my young age of about six, I had no idea what this meant, but I could see that the sadness was no longer to be found in just his eyes. He was confined first to a wheelchair, which quickly progressed to a hospital bed, and finally an oxygen machine. The doctors piped a tube through to his stomach so he could pour food from a blender in to feed himself.

One September morning, at great risk to his health, he was away from his oxygen machine long enough to take breakfast with us out on the patio. He had immense trouble speaking because his swollen glands constricted his throat, making it difficult to emit sound.
“You look lovely,” he said, but all I heard was a garbled mess.
“He said you look lovely” my mother clarified.
“Oh, thank you,” I replied, unsure of what to say.
"Yes, you do," he said again. These were his last words to me.

The summer went by all to fast and in the fall I began school. I went to the school that my Opa had been the principal at before he fell sick.

In October, it got worse. The only way he could communicate was by writing and soon his hands were shaking so badly it was difficult for him to even do that. By the end of the month, he was passing the time just staring into space or wearing such a painful expression that everyone left his side except Oma.

Then, early one morning in November, he was gone. That was it, no more. I didn’t believe it; he was Opa and he couldn’t die. Everyone brought flowers and casseroles. The entire time I wondered why. Didn’t they understand that he was alive? How could a man so alive in my heart suddenly cease to exist? Where did he go? Will he ever be back?

For years after that I would see a tall, white-haired man with glasses and think it was he, that he had run away and come back again.

One afternoon the following April, when I was in first grade, my mom came to pick up my cousin and me from school. She said the car was dying every few feet so we should wait until it had a chance to cool off before starting on the six-mile drive home. Then, even though my mom insisted there was an improvement, the car was still shutting off every thirty or forty feet.

Suddenly a little red car on our right ran the red light just as our car died for what seemed like the millionth time. A pickup truck that was already in the intersection swerved right through the spot where we would have been, that is, if our car had been moving. We were lucky, the truck was totaled, but we were completely unscathed. Everybody said it was a miracle that we weren’t hurt, but I knew that it was no coincidence. My mom said it was Opa watching over us, and I agreed.

The whole ordeal took less than three seconds. In my tiny, simple mind, I did not understand the extent of the damage that might have taken place. I did, however, understand that even though the man walking down the street wasn’t Opa, he would always exist in everything. Maybe he had something to do with our car trouble that day, maybe not, but I do know that because I love him, he cannot be dead. He will always exist in my mind, and in my heart.