Training With Tim

It’s still hard to believe that my grandpa’s gone.

I accept it, and from what my mom reports, he did too. He knew it was his time and he told everyone they had to let him go. He went very peacefully.

You hear “I can’t believe he’s gone” when someone dies young or unexpectedly. This wasn’t the case. Grandpa was 83 and was undergoing chemotherapy. Pneumonia finally took him, and he might have even beaten that had silo gas not damaged his lungs some 40 years ago.

But Grandpa never seemed like an old man. Grandpa was a force of nature.

What’s hard to believe is that he’s done with all his work. Grandpa was a man who always had some project to attend to. Right up to the end. He helped roof my parent’s house last summer, and after he was diagnosed with cancer, he went right back to working on the farm. The doctors were baffled.

I overhead my dad explaining to someone at the funeral home today that Grandpa would chew him out because he talked to his customers too much. Less talk, more work. That was his way.

(By the way, Grandpa was right. Dad does talk too much to his customers. But he works just as much as he talks. That’s his way.)

I found a newspaper clipping at the funeral that talked about Grandpa at age 17. Even then he already managed chickens and hogs, landscaped on the farm and planted hybrid popcorn. The author noted that this kid didn’t exactly have a lot of free time.

Growing up, my parents sometimes said I’m exactly like my Grandpa. It was usually when I was telling them how something had to be done my way. Immediately. It was their way of saying I should calm down a little.

But like I said just a few months ago when my grandma Juanita died, there was another side to him. It came out a little more clearly when he was dancing the polka or serving up ice cream. I saw it in pictures of him holding his kids, like my dad as a toddler on the seat of a tractor (naturally). The man definitely knew how to enjoy life. He just usually had to be moving while doing it. I think I can relate.

Grandpa was in rare form the last time I saw him, after he had started the chemo. He sat. And talked. And talked some more. He was relaxed, in a grand mood and told stories I’d never heard before. I’d certainly never saw him sit still that long.

Grandpa talked about his dad, who died in his 50s from cancer. Before he passed away, my great-grandpa cleared out and drained acres and acres of crop fields surrounding the family farm. By hand and horsepower only. Grandpa shook his head in disbelief when he considered how much his own dad accomplished in his short lifetime.

“I don’t know how he did all that,” Grandpa said.

I told Grandpa that I’m sure his dad would say the same thing about him.

After his dad died, Grandpa took over the entire farm when he was just 23. And he grew it into an empire. (My aunt even wrote a paper about it.) I can’t even imagine that kind of responsibility. When I was 23, I was getting paid like $25 to write about bartenders. I might still be doing that, actually.

You meet a lot of people at funerals who you don’t really know. You stand in line and shake their hands, sometimes knowing only that you have at least one thing in common that brings you together.

I met one person who said my Grandpa gave him his first ever job — in trucking — which earned him his money for college. Another said he remembered him “always going 100 miles an hour.” One guy looked me in the eye and said, “No one could say he wasn’t a great man.”

Another person I met said he went to school with Grandpa. He had a hard time speaking and seemed a little disoriented. So when he started telling me a story, I didn’t understand right away.

“You know, your Grandpa didn’t learn to walk,” he said.

Grandpa may have been missing two fingers from a cornpicker, but he never lost a leg like some farmers I knew growing up. I was confused. So I asked him what he meant.

“He ran first.”