Before Grandpa Died
I can still recall the curious smashing, crunching sound.
The soft September morning light came through the parted blinds as I held his hand. “Good morning, Grandpa,” I said softly and kissed his warm cheek.
I hadn’t slept well in the stiff, orange-vinyl-covered armchair next to the hospital bed. Grandpa, who appeared to be sleeping deeply, was not expected to wake up from the coma that had trapped him a few days prior. I alone was sitting beside him.
Later in the morning and throughout the day, more and more people would be coming to visit him here in Alexandria Hospital. But these early hours were ours, alone together. More alone than together.
Grandpa Hood wasn’t actually my grandpa, but through my relationship with his grandson, we had become family.
My fiancé's military career had found us temporarily stationed in Alexandria, Virginia. He was there for one year of intense Intelligence training and travel. I was there because he was.
We lived on the seventh floor of a tall, narrow apartment building overlooking a little valley. From our windows, we had a direct view of Grandpa’s sixth-floor condominium balcony just across the way.
At night, we could see each other’s glowing lights.
With my fiancé away on military duties a good majority of the time, Grandpa and I shared countless hours together. Weekend getaways, shopping trips, inside jokes, conversation-driven dinners. He bought me my first cell phone, I baked him bread and cookies. He gave me a beautiful birds-eye maple dressing table that had been in his family for over a hundred years, I got him a vanity license plate honoring his time as an Air Force P-38 pilot in World War II.
When I was home alone, we called each other to say goodnight, and he signaled me with his condo lights — from on to off, three times, the last time remaining dark as he went to sleep.
He told people I was his favorite granddaughter. He was my Grandpa. We were closer to each other than he was to his actual grandchild, my fiancé. Closer, perhaps, than I was to his grandson. We shared a connection that made me believe past-life theories could possibly be true. In my heart’s deepest recesses, I had known and loved him much longer than our brief years together. Longer than my 30 years, or his 86 years.
When the military moved us to Florida, Grandpa and I spoke nearly every day on the phone. He walked me down the sandy aisle when I married his grandson in a small, quiet, Cocoa-Beach-oceanside ceremony. He flew down every other month or so from Virginia and had his own bedroom in our on-base duplex. He came to stay with me when my husband was deployed for weeks at a time to unknown-to-me locations.
And yet, I kept a secret from my closest ally and friend.
I never revealed what I had started noticing shortly after the move to Florida. Even as it worsened after the wedding to the point I could no longer deny it to myself, I never confessed it to Grandpa. I could never tell him that behind closed doors I was living through some of the worst years of my life, thanks to that grandson.
That convincingly camouflaged monster of a husband, gone more than he was home. Probably how I survived so long.
My entire family, clueless on the opposite coast. Don’t tell, that will make it worse when he finds out.
Kept somewhat isolated with no real friends. No access to money. Limited access to monitored communications with my family back home. Smile and laugh, hide what’s real. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.
Grandpa was the one stabilizing presence in my life during this time. I loved him. I love him.
But I lied to him with my silence.
Now here I was, back in Virginia, having flown to his side as soon as I got the news. Sleeping in a chair beside his hospital bed.
Shortly before 9 a.m., a commotion in the hospital corridor drew my attention. “Turn on the TV,” I heard someone shouting, “You gotta see this!”
I did.
A few staff came in to watch Grandpa’s little television, mounted high. There had been a terrible accident: an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City!
We were glued in shock to see the footage of such an unbelievable tragedy. More people came in to watch until there were nearly a dozen people crowded into Grandpa’s tiny room — nurses, orderlies, a doctor, a custodian.
Over and over the news channels played the same video — crash, explosion. Crash, explosion. Crash, explosion.
Crash.
Explosion.
Then the angle shifted. The screen showed a different video, a different viewpoint.
A nurse moaned, “That’s a different plane. That’s the second tower.”
I could no longer hear anything but what was coming from the box, muffled by the sound of the blood rushing to my head.
Someone muttered, “This was no accident.” Cue the weeping, moaning. Running, shouting. Shocked, stone-still silence.
Not an accident, I thought, Not an accident. Not an accident.
A few people stayed in that third-floor hospital room with me, glued to the news coverage. Others had stepped away to try and call their people: husbands who worked nearby at the Pentagon, cousins who lived in New York, spouses and children at home whose parents just needed to hear their voices.
I remember one woman remained in the room, rooted to where she stood and staring at the screen. Silent tears falling.
I knew this was big, but I didn’t really grasp the full picture.
About half an hour later, Grandpa and I were alone once again. I reached for the TV remote. Grandpa doesn’t need to hear this. Before I could find the [mute] key, a nurse came into the room for something. I never found out what, because suddenly we heard a strange sound in the courtyard outside Grandpa’s window. A curious smashing, crunching sound. Thunder. Bowling pins falling. Not quite, though.
We ran to the windows.
It sounded as though a dump truck had pulled up and dumped a load of concrete bricks. Looking through the blinds, we couldn’t see anything to explain the noise. A moment passed, and the newscaster stammered that a plane had just crashed into the Pentagon, only five miles from the hospital.
Not a truck in the courtyard.
The nurse collapsed to the floor, her own concrete bricks too much to bear.
Not concrete bricks.
More nurses and staff streamed into the room to learn what they could from Grandpa’s TV. Some women were crying and saying that their husbands were working there — in the Pentagon.
I realized this is monumental.
I turned off the TV because I felt that Grandpa could hear everything that was going on.
This will NOT be his last memory on earth.
I learned that the fainted nurse was the wife of an Air Force NCO working at the Pentagon. The trauma and drama of the day separated us, and I never learned her husband’s fate— if she ever got “the call.”
Next morning. Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
I was still numb from the past 24 hours. It had been a day of disbelief, terror, grief, anguish, and helplessness, all mixed together but also cycling in turns through my mind. I’ve never experienced anything darker or more bewildering.
The soft September morning light came through the parted blinds as I held Grandpa’s hand.
“Good morning, Grandpa,” I said softly and kissed his cheek. His cold cheek.
He waited, I thought. Grandpa had held on just a little bit longer for me. He knew it would have been too much for one day.
Goodbye, Grandpa.
