An explination

The last week and a half, I was absent, reserved and worse than normal, for all those who read this, I offer an apology.  My grandfather died on Monday and was interred on Friday (hence my absence from the majority of Party on the Field and graduation rehersal).

I told only a few people, and only as they needed to know (subsequently, an E-mail was floating around the Comm. department, but we're pretty close to family so I didn't mind).  I didn't want people to worry, or to take away from their senior weeks.

I miss him a lot, he understood me better than anyone else in my family, and I'm the spitting image of him in all respects (even character and temperment).  It's going to be hard I know, even though we've been expecting this for a while, but I'm still so scared.

He was one child of 14 (I believe, it may be 12, but either way, it was a lot, and during the depression, it made life difficult).  He worked until the end, four days before he died he was outside doing what he loved, working in his gardens.  He had no tolerance for laziness, and constantly told us to suck it up and deal with it, which he so often did, refusing to let anyone know how much pain he was in, how much he hurt.  And I think it made it easier for him, knowing his end was coming, but we all know it's not an end, he's with the rest of our family now, and we can rest assured that he's not suffering, which is what helped me to get through all of this.  He served in WWII on LST-31, which was built here in Pittsburgh.  He boarded and sailed to New Orleans, Guantanamo Bay, the Panama Canal and Hawaii.  He served in three combat missions, one time acting as bait for the Japanese.  He cleaned guns and had a monkey, which subsequently went crazy and jumped overboard, where he and his shipmates learned it could not swim.  No one was really sad the monkey sank, he was mean anyway.  My grandpa was a master plumber.  He worked on the plumbing for the Kennedy Space Center, and most of Monroeville, Murrysville and the Irwin area.  He built all the homes around his, and then his.  His favorite saying to the end was, "it's a bunch of bullshit!"  And we've repeated that a countless number of times as we remember him.  He tore down a wall to build a greenhouse, even though my grandma told him not to (he waited until she had left for the weekend).  He tore down a wall in a house his son was looking at, before he bought it.  He reused coffee grounds for a week, making the worlds weakest coffee (so I'm told at least).  He built the two shelves in my room, the bookends, and taught me to love plants and attemted to make me a woodworker (although I subsequently turned to leatherworking).  He loved his wife, and even though they would swear at each other in their own tongues (him in german, her in lebanese), they were married for over 60 years.  When he died, my family toasted his horribly weak coffee.  As he was wheeled out of the house, the grandfather clock rung midnight.  He built that clock; it was the only gift from his wife he wasn't able to guess.

I'm so incredibly honored to have been his grandson, and I know how much he loved all of his family.  This is hard, and I know it will be hard for a long time yet, but it's gotten a little easier.  I'm sorry to all the people I didn't get to say goodbye to, who I didn't have the chance to spend time with, but my mind was elsewhere.  Please don't be mad, I'll be around to visit, I promise.