Visiting Hours

When I was about eight, I was riding my bike around the yard at my grandparents' home by the lake. It was an old bike, big, wide handle bars, big, bouncy seat - the kind that looks perfect with a huge basket tied to the front - the kind the Wicked Witch might ride in the Wizard of Oz. I am sure it was something my grandfather picked up at a yard sale for the grandkids to ride.

Their driveway was dirt and kind of circular. I wasn't old enough yet to be allowed to ride loops that went out onto the dirt road, so I road down the driveway and then cut a path through the wooded space between the driveway and the road. I remember riding around and around and around until the front wheel caught the edge of a small tree stump. I fell, and the big, old handle bar caught my sternum, hurting, I am sure, and knocking the wind completely out of me. My grandfather came running and as I started to catch my breath, I saw that he was the one with tears in his eyes.

That image, and its feeling, have stayed with me - that love that feels your pain.

My grandfather was rushed to the emergency room this morning with chest pains. After a few hours of unknown, he luckily needed only to be observed, no procedures. He was admitted and is there for the night. The past few weeks have brought tremendous change for him and for my grandmother. After a fall and a cracked bone, she moved into a nursing facility for rehab. He has just joined her there. It is too much to be apart after 68 years of marriage.

I visited my grandfather tonight on my way home from yoga. He looked good. His color good. His spirits good. He was talkative as always. He looked to me the way he has always looked. And yet, I know that is impossible. I have known him for 35 years. He certainly must look different, but for some reason, tonight, in his hospital bed, he looked just the same. Same blue eyes. Same white hair. Same bald head I have always known. Despite the circumstances, it was a nice visit. The hospital, at night, is a fairly quiet, private place. My children were home asleep. No one else was there. Just me. There are probably very few times in my adult life I have found myself alone with my grandfather and it was nice.

We didn't talk about anything important, just the things that are important - the weather, Cate and Alex, what time we fall asleep, what time we wake up. Just the things people talk about. It was my same grandfather as always. The one who pulled me around the yard in a wagon behind his tractor, who saved a cookie in his lunchbox for me to find when he came home from work, the one who could make funny noises, impossible to mimic, and make his toothpick disappear and reappear before my very eyes. The one who could talk for hours to any stranger he might meet on the street.

When it comes to grandfathers, I couldn't have asked for more - fishing poles, and rubber rafts, homemade peach ice cream packed with the last snow in the spring, camping trips and warm fires in the winter, drawers filled with old pictures and stories about days long gone by and always the feeling of being so, so special.

As a great grandfather he is proud - proud of his new granddaughter from China - eager to show old tricks to Alex - tying a piece of red yarn to the end of fishing line and waving it through the air to make frogs jump from their pond - happy to give a ride on his electric wheel chair, still making that same funny noise, impossible to mimic.

Sometimes life seems to separate our paths from those we love - me caught up in the world of motherhood, of raising a young family, him watching a family already grown facing the pitfalls of age. And yet, our paths are still the same.

"I always wondered what I would be doing when I was old," he said tonight. "Now I know."

And it strikes me that we are all always on our journey, wondering what it will be like, sometimes finally knowing, only to find ourselves wondering again.

What helps us along is those things, those people that stay the same. When I left the hospital tonight, my grandfather had tears in his eyes. He has always been emotional. And I journeyed home with that feeling of being so, so special.