A nurse came into the hospital room and announced that my poppa had to go in for some more tests. She said it matter-of-factly.
At this news, my poppa grimaced. “Why?” he asked. “You just gave me some tests.”
“Doctor’s orders,” she said.
No, I wanted to tell the nurse. Enough stupid tests. Leave my poppa alone. Let him stay in his bed. It’s bad enough he has cancer of the throat.
But instead, I said nothing. I was neither a doctor nor a nurse and who was I to butt in. After all, this was Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Besides, maybe the tests would help save him.
The nurse came over to the bed and asked my poppa to roll over on his side. He followed her instruction, and she hoisted him gingerly onto a gurney and wheeled him out of his room and into the hall.
“I’ll go with you, Pop,” I said and walked alongside.
My grandfather Benjamin Sheft took me to my first baseball game, at Yankee Stadium in 1960, when I was 8 years old. He also took me to see the Yankees in the 1964 World Series. This was at a time when baseball meant even more to me than taking every opportunity in my eighth grade classroom to gape at all the pretty girls. No one in my life ever treated me better than he.
There, in the Bronx, in the upper deck in left field, amid the aroma of beer and hot dogs, I was having such a good time I turned to my grandfather and said, “I wish this would never end.”
He looked me in the eye, a somber expression on his face, and said softly, “Everything comes to an end.”
I had no idea what he meant. Even so, I refused to believe it could be true.
Now the nurse steered my poppa into the elevator and pressed the button for a lower floor. He lay on his back on the gurney, under the bedsheet, staring at the ceiling. I stood right next to him. The doors slid shut, and the elevator slowly descended.
The nurse watched the numbers for each floor flash. I still resented her for insisting, without a hint of sympathy, on uprooting my poppa from his room.
Then, just as I thought this thought, I heard it. A sound like none I’ve ever heard before or since.
It was a wail. My poppa was letting out a wail. It sounded like a siren, high-pitched and piercing.
I looked down at him, there on the gurney under the sheets. He was sobbing. He was contorting his face, his lips pressed together, his nose wrinkling, his cheeks turning red. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, as if to shield himself from seeing his future.
I placed my hand on his arm to try to comfort him. But he kept wailing his heart out. He wailed to the heavens, for mercy, afraid for his life, afraid of what might come next, crying out, for all I knew, for God to spare him.
My grandfather could see it all now. The end was coming. It was the keening of a mourner. He was lamenting his own loss.
And so my poppa wailed. He raged against the dying of the light. No law says we have to go quietly.
And then, at age 74, he died. Benjamin Sheft — who emigrated from Russia with his parents and siblings as a 2-year-old, who was the first in our family to graduate from college, who scraped to raise his son and daughter in the thick of the Great Depression, who went on to achieve financial success and play with his four adoring grandchildren — was gone.
I was 29, and no one had ever died on me.
At the time, I realized maybe he was right. Everything does come to an end. The Yankees I worshipped in the 1960s came to an end. My boyhood came to an end. Even the original Yankee Stadium came to an end. And then, just like that, I lost others, first my remaining grandparents, then my father, my beloved mother-in-law and my mother. I, too, have wailed.
But later, much later, I decided my poppa was also mistaken. And every Thanksgiving serves to remind me. Nothing has to come to an end unless those who are left behind let it. As long as I’m still here, my poppa is still here too. And so is everyone else. If we always remember to honor those gone, they never really go all that far away.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist living in Italy, is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.” He contributes to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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