Things I remember about my grandfather
When our 2020 India trip was a couple weeks away, my dad mentioned coronavirus. He was concerned, he said, about the fact that we were flying through Beijing and this virus was proving it could rapidly decimate large swaths of people. I dismissed him, because it was early January and I hadn’t heard a thing on the news channels I follow. We all know how this story ends.
We ended up not flying through Beijing. Our rationale was that my grandparents, who were all in their late 80s, probably should not, and could not, take the risk that we transmit anything to them, especially anything that was proving as deadly as coronavirus. We made our trip through New York, saw the family, came back, and settled back into work.
Within one month, all three of us (my mom, dad, and I) were working from home due to California’s shelter-in-place order. About a week into the sheltering, we found out my grandpa passed away. He had slowed down pretty substantially in the last couple years, we knew. Naively, with all of our precautions around COVID, we didn’t see it coming so soon, and we certainly didn’t see old age being the cause. (I guess no one does?)
I am a list-maker through and through, so I made this one:
Things I remember about my grandfather:
He would eat literally anything. When my grandparents were staying with us in America for the summer, I used to make various “soups” out of boiled water that had vegetables floating in it. He always ate them.
He couldn’t sit still for the life of him. If you even so much as mentioned needing a band-aid, he had his shoes on and was already on his way to the drugstore.
One summer in India I was obsessed with toast. Don’t ask me why. For the whole summer, he not only made sure our bread and butter were stockpiled, he also had toast with me.
As soon as you brought back any kind of snack from the store, he wanted to try it. It was like he had a homing device on any and all snacks that entered his home.
Anytime anyone came down the stairs he would shout to my grandmother that they were ready to take their tea. Towards the end, all he shouted was her name. She always got it.
Before his knee replacements he liked to sit on the couch with one knee crossed ALL the way over the other. I copied him for a full year.
He read every single newspaper they got to the house every single morning without fail.
Of interest to him on the TV was cricket and the news. Nothing more, nothing less.
Once, as many Asian grandparents do, he told me I was looking “a little round.” But also, I wasn’t eating enough. The eternal catch-22. I tell that story to literally everyone because it always makes me laugh.
I was OBSESSED with sliding down the banister of my grandparents’ staircase because it looked just like the ones in the movies. He would always watch like a hawk because he was convinced I was going to fall.
Every morning we were in India he’d say, “Good morning, baby!” to me. I can still hear it. ❤️
