I Don't Have the Words

My grandpa died the way radioactive isotopes decay: in half lives.

A month ago, they said he would live a few more months. A week ago, they said he would live a few more weeks. On Monday it was one week. On Tuesday it was 48 hours.

He passed away on Tuesday night.

He brought me books, my grandpa. Baby-Sitters Club books and most of Road Dahl's works; my first copy of The Hobbit and a second-edition copy of The Silmarillion; even Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites. He would never have read the Tennis Shoes books himself because he wasn't LDS or even religious. Still he found copies on his many trips to used book stores, and what he found, he brought to us.

There other books: my books. He was always asking to see the stories I wrote. A few years ago, I gave him my only hard copy of a manuscript I was trying to publish. He said it wasn't "his type" of story and he didn't get very far, so I expected to get it back soon. Instead Grandpa, apparently praising the manuscript that he hadn't read, passed it on to my uncle, who read it and liked it and gave to my aunt. My aunt loved it and gave it to my cousin and his wife. Last I heard, it was with another aunt and uncle in Texas. I'm thinking I won't get it back.

There were other things, like the trips to McDonald's and the collection of canes and the inexplicable love of UNR. There was a lot, most of which I couldn't accurately explain without pages and pages at my disposal.

Then he died. Death doesn't scare LDS people the way it does some. We have a pretty good understanding of what's on the other side. Uniquely, we believe that people can still progress even after death. We believe that those who get to the afterlife and wish they could change still can. But we also believe that people are much the same in death as they are in life and that not even the experience of returning to God will have much effect on some.

I don't know if my grandpa will choose to progress or not. The uncertainty of not knowing has weighed on me these past days. But what I do know is that things work out. It's not always a terribly comforting piece of knowledge, no. But it's true, nonetheless.