“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. But when I got older, I decided that it was enough to just be the best man I can be.”
-Neil Prince
My Grandpa was a good man. One of the best men I ever knew. I suppose a lot of people say that about their grandpas, that he was a great man who loved his family. But that doesn’t take away from the facts, really.
He was incredibly smart too -- he attended the Naval Academy, and was an engineer and a professor of math. More impressively, he helped my sister and me with our math homework after school when we were in elementary school. It’s one thing to be good at math. It’s another thing to be able to teach a third grader to be good at math. No amount of intellect brings the kind of patience or good humor that requires. Yet that’s the sort of man he was. He was a good man.
In one of those cruel tricks of nature, one of the worst things happened to him that could happen to any engineer or mathematician or human being. We watched his mind fall away in little pieces over the course of several years. Alzheimer’s is a heartless disease that robbed him of many things -- ultimately robbed him of much of his very self. It took and took and took until there was almost nothing left. The one thing it could not rob him of completely was his good humor. Even in the last months, he would crack a smile or make a funny face to make you laugh. I want to believe that this was somehow innate, so essential to him that even such a ruthless thief could not take it away. He was such a good man.
After he passed away, I sifted through pictures for hours trying to find a few snapshots to capture such a full life. It’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but even a hundred pictures were not enough. Needing a break, I started to write down some words, words that I had always associated with him. The things he used to say.
“Once I thought I was wrong, but it turned out I was mistaken.”
“I see, said that blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.”
“Quit dinkin’ around!”
“Oh, fart!!”
“I have a paragoric!”
“What the hell?!”
I was struck by the life that those words previously only spoken took on when they were committed to paper, letters danced and rippled on the page in cadence with the sound of his voice. They are little pieces of an infinitely good life. Little pieces of an infinitely good man.
One of the paradoxes I love about the words and about him is that they are equal parts faithful and delightfully irreverent. He always caught a laugh from me when he pretended to snore during grace before a meal. Yet I never knew him to miss Sunday Mass. It’s funny how from the mouth of a good man, even the so-called bad words are deemed acceptable. How they still carry bits of life in them even when everything else is gone.
Such is the power of good words.
Such is the power of a good man.
Donations can be made to the Alzheimers Association of Central and North Florida here.
