The Man We Never Speak Of

My grandfather was a sailor.

He went to the yacht club and sailed sailboats. I have a silver tray that he won at a Regatta. Proof of a life I would otherwise believe belonged to someone else, except for the shared blood that runs through my veins. My grandfather, would have loved my Flossie forever. Instead, he loved her for as long as he could. He would have taught his children things only a father can. My mother would have been able to call him dad. Instead, he died before his children had the chance to know him, before my mother and her youngest brother knew what they should call him. He was only a few years older than I am now.

We never speak of him.

He was the man who began a family and set us on our course. Him. His family...An ironic thought of some place long ago and far away.

And for that, we reward him with our silence. With the distant, fading memory of who he was. He is everyday rewarded by his family who never speaks of him.

He was an English professor. He wrote a thesis on Wuthering Heights. My mother was four-years old when he died. He was a handsome man. In pictures he has the kind of eyes that make you look back at him, the kind you trust.

He is buried in a flat field in a state filled with mountains. We never go there. I think I've only been there one time.

I don't know much more about who my grandfather was. He loved sailing and English. I don't know if he loved English because he liked to write, or if it was because he liked to read. I don't know why it was English, and not History or Math.

He was a professor, who moved his wife and four children from the safety of their Massachusetts roots to a place far away. He was to be a professor at Columbus Academy. They didn't know anyone in Columbus. I don't believe he ever taught a day at that prestigious school.

I think it was somewhere along the way, before their journey to their new life was complete that he got sick. Short of breath walking up a hill. Went to a doctor. Lung Cancer. Couple months? Maybe it was only a couple of weeks. Whatever it was, it was swift.

I've never even asked if he smoked. He was young. He had sort of wavy hair and he looked like he was a man who thought a lot. I bet when he spoke, people would listen. I recognize him only from a few pictures that remain and the oddly similar and hauntingly familiar features of his face in my cousin Ben.

Like his image in Ben, I wonder if his legacy to me was the gift of writing, or for poetry, or even in a shared love for Heathcliff and Catherine.

After all. He was my grandfather.

Who would he have been? Who would he have been to me? Who would he have been to us...To his daughter...And his wife...And to his sons.

I wonder if he would have taught me about what it was like growing up in New England. Or if we would have spent summers on a sail boat. Or under a tree reading books. What would the professor have taught me...

We are all full of a quiet sadness that has never been addressed.

For him.

He is the man we never speak of. He was a sailor and a teacher. He was a father and a husband. He was a son.

What I realize now, even though I would never know him, is that he was my grandfather. For thirty years I tried to figure that out. The man we do not speak of and who he was to me.

A few years ago, we went to the flat field to pay our silent hommage to this man, our grandfather, father, and husband. It was the first time I learned anything more about him than his affinity for the water or his choice of profession. It was twenty-five years or so before I would hear for the first time about how he and Flossie met. How they fell in love. What life was like in that sleepy New England town. A little about how he lived. Who he was. How he died.

But we never talk about what life is like without him. How we have missed knowing him. How we missed loving him. How I'd never know the sound of his voice or if when he laughed, if he laughed hard. We never talk about all the memories we would never make.

He is the man we never speak of.

He was an English professor. A sailor. He was a father. A husband. A son. A friend. The man we never speak of was also my grandfather.

I can only speculate about the reason that those who knew him, those who heard his voice, those who knew the touch of his hands, and who understood the content of his character do not speak of him. It is as if they are saying a silent prayer for him because to them, he was so much more.