Thank You, Vampire Grandpa
Long ago, a dream gave me the closure I desperately needed
“It’s okay, Daddy. I never die.” My four-year-old proved this by leaping from the top of his bunk bed and across the room, landing with a resounding “thud” that I’m sure our neighbors couldn’t escape. “See!”
You can’t argue with toddler logic. It is iron-clad.
My cautions and protests fell on deaf ears. Until children experience death first-hand, they cannot seem to fathom it as more than theory.
Around the age of seven, I was burst out of my own happy, bullet-proof bubble when three of my grandparents died within a year of each other. It was a season of funerals, with others in the extended family also passing. I took much solace from deli platters.
Those who departed included my mother’s father, my grandpa. Broad and tall, with large, Polish fists, he seemed more mountain than man to me. As my father was emotionally distant, my grandpa (and Optimus Prime) was my primary male influence, taking me on errands or watching me so my mother could work outside the home.
He has been a constant companion, and had easily tolerated my blather about the Tranzor Z episode I caught that morning. We would have wrestled or played endless games of War with cards. (Never did he tell me that War was only a game of luck. I loved it.)
And unlike my nursing home-bound paternal grandmother, he had still been so vital, so strong. After a mild heart attack, he seemed on the road to recovery. Then, suddenly, he was gone — a death that my mother attributes to complications from an injection. My mom’s mom soon followed, suffering from cancer and a broken heart.
The POP POP POP machine-gun burst of losses shocked me to my core. Of those, none affected me more than the loss of my grandfather, my best friend. The television tried to become my new bosom buddy, but it could never take his place.
I don’t know whether it was a practice she learned from her Catholic upbringing, but my mother advised me to pray for and to my departed relatives. “You can say hi to Grandpa and Grandma; they can hear you.”
It felt like walking a one-way street. Was anything out there? My early belief in God was fracturing along with my sense of immortality.
Without knowing how to grieve or cope, I returned to school and other activities. I was still alive, but it felt different — more tenuous, less concrete. I was distracted. There was no support group to be found on the playground.
Perhaps as a consequence, I experienced a vivid and nightmarish dreamlife. Oh, I always had colorful nighttime adventures, some starting even while I still thought I was awake, fighting sleep through hypnagogic hallucinations that placed cartoons and demons in my open eyes.
This was different.
I experienced a long sequence of nightmares, like episodes of thirty-minute television shows. Each night held multiples. When one ended, another began. Memory has faded, but they may even have had titles and ending credits, sometimes.
There was no hiding from them. I had to sleep. During the day, I fought sadness. At night, I ran from assorted evils, sometimes shocking awake as I met my own end.
I continued the nightly prayers, not knowing what else to do, having no faith that Grandpa heard me. It was better than doing nothing.
This may have gone on for days or weeks. Who can tell, as children reckon time?
Maybe I’d had enough. One night, instead of throwing me into another pit of devils, Mr. Sandman threw me a bone.
It started, I suppose, like any of the other nightmare episodes. One dream ended, there was an intermission, and the next began.
The details have faded, but I remember one thing. Vampire Grandpa came to visit.
Initially, I was scared to meet him. He looked like a cross between my grandfather and Grandpa from the Munsters, with pale skin, a high forehead, and dark hair. (My actual grandpa’s hair had been thin and light when I knew him.)
What remains of the dream is a sense that Vampire Grandpa was, well, a vampire, but not one that harmed people. Maybe it started as a nightmare, but his appearance, so like the man that meant so much to me, changed the course of the dream. It caused me to sympathize with him.
We spoke with each other. I might even have told him he looked like my grandpa. He commiserated with me for my loss, admitting he was not my relative. He was kind, and we talked for a while.
In the dream narrative, I sensed others meant to persecute him for being different. I prepared to stand up for him. The dream ended shortly thereafter.
Looking backward, I realize now that this was the moment that my existential dread lessened. Simply meeting this sympathetic vampire, as unreal as he was, had a real effect on my young life.
I don’t recall any hospital bedside visit with my grandpa to act as a transition or preparation. There had been no goodbye the last time I’d seen him— not the forever kind, just the “see you later; I love you” kind. The abruptness of his passing had left a wound that would not close.
After meeting Vampire Grandpa, I was able to let go. I had closure. In a way, I saw my grandfather again. Whether or not he continued on in spirit, he had continued, in a way, in my consciousness.
After meeting Vampire Grandpa, I was able to let go.
This released the pent-up pressure that kept me from enjoying waking life, and I’m grateful for it. Whatever he was, figment or random impulse, he saved me. I’d been held in a chokehold by fear and despair, unable to articulate my struggle, and Vampire Grandpa wrestled me out of it.
It’s a little tragicomic that now I can picture Vampire Grandpa more vividly than my actual grandfather. It might be a consequence of having met him more recently.
But I won’t resent him for it. He was a balm and an antidote to my misery.
Thank you, Vampire Grandpa. I’ll always remember you, whatever you were.
Instead of fighting nightmares, Grin Spickett struggles now to find time to write.
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