Eulogy for my Grandfather

My paternal grandfather died last week. I had the honor of sharing in his care the last few years and wrote this for his funeral.  Before he died, I also took a photo of his hands, hands that were in WWII, the garden, the electrical wires. Hands that held three generations of babies. He will be missed.

Jerry McClellan Baker, who was my grandfather, died Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2014. He was 89. When my cousin Jeff was a small child, he named him Mi. The entire family started calling him that from then on.

My grandfather was a veteran. He left his formal schooling to join the military and served in the Navy on a hospital ship in World War II.  He walked on the beaches of Hiroshima three days after the bomb was dropped there. Many years later he went back to school to get his high school diploma, the same year as my father.

My grandfather was a hard worker. He worked for Texas Power and Light for 40 years. When storms blew down electrical wires, he helped fix them. He installed insulators on electrical lines in Irving, some that are still there today. He never had an accident while working and received many commendations for his safety and hard work at a dangerous job.

My grandfather was a devoted husband. Though my grandmother died eight years ago and despite the many ladies at the retirement complex that fell in love with his shy sense of humor, since 1946 he was oblivious to the existence of any other woman. When I asked him what he liked best about her initially, he told me he liked that she was a girl.

My grandfather was green before the term existed. When I was a child, he and my grandmother saved every empty coke and beer can in a bag to give to my mother for recycling. My mother collected the cans and recycled them for money. We bought our family’s first microwave with recycling money.

My grandfather was firm in his opinions. Every day he listened to Rush Limbaugh at 11:00.  It didn’t matter if you were visiting or not, he put Rush on the radio and carried that radio with him wherever he went. He never tired of sharing his political opinions with me and giving me a hard time about mine.

My grandfather was funny. He usually had a joke to tell. The best part of him telling the jokes was in the telling. He would laugh so hard he couldn’t breathe and you couldn’t understand a word he said. Then he’d look at you for your reaction to the punchline.  I just always laughed no matter what. Later, I would try to piece together what he said.

My grandfather was a gardener. He and my grandmother grew vegetables in a huge garden and canned or froze them. They would send extra okra home with me. When I visited them as an adult, they would make sure to have picked enough okra to sit with me and teach me how to cover it with flour, salt, and cornmeal before freezing it for later. One summer they weren’t able to harvest very much okra, so my grandfather made a deal with a man at the farmer’s market to buy a case, just to make sure there was enough for me.

The yard had huge pecan trees in it and every fall my husband and I would help Mi pick up his pecans. He would call me and laugh and tell me the pecans had fallen and it was time for us to come “nut grabbing.” The kids started helping as well. Adam would get the leaf blower and blow away the leaves. The kids and I would use some special sticks to pick up the pecans and put them in a bucket. Mi would sit in his driveway with two buckets: one for keeping and the other for tossing. He could tell the quality of a pecan just by looking at the outside.

My grandfather was generous. He gave away anything that he thought might be useful to someone else. A car, a dollar, a tool; he’d part with anything if a loved one could use it. Even in his last years, when his possessions fit into a small apartment, he would still save coupon circulars for me or send home a package of crackers for my children.

Very few things made it to the trashcan. Visine bottles were repurposed for eyeglasses cleaner. Windex went in empty nose spray bottles as well. The eyeglasses he wore initially belonged to my grandmother, but he said they worked fine for him. Mail order packages that contained his prescriptions were reused as ice packs. Empty medicine bottles became spit cans for his snuff. I had to secretly throw away old receipts or moldy food when I came to visit. One day when he wasn’t feeling well, he said all I did when I visited his apartment was fill his trashcan. I figured if that was all he could think about to complain about me, then I was doing pretty well.

My grandfather was creative. He was always planning some home improvement project. When he bought new recliners, he also bought covers for them. The covers didn’t exactly fit right, so one summer I spent every Friday sewing and re-sewing covers for his chairs. I was never able to complete that project to perfection and ended up using safety pins to hold the covers on. Most recently he told me he wanted his couch to be a foot higher. We had just begun the brainstorming process on how to fix that problem.

I learned a wealth of knowledge from my grandfather. He was so particular, but even that was a lesson to me. As he aged, his world became smaller and little details that wouldn’t have meant anything when he was younger now meant the world to him. Jeff and I were constantly buying and rebuying supplies for his apartment. Jeff would go one day and buy groceries and then I would return the next day only to go buy different brands of the same products. It was a lesson for both of us. We both had the freedom and flexibility of living out in the real world with jobs, kids, and cars. Any time I want a box of crackers, I can hop in my car and buy one. Therefore crackers aren’t that important to me. But if I wasn’t able to buy the crackers myself, if I was at the mercy of whoever was kind enough to stop by and bring me crackers, those crackers would have much more importance.

Jeff and I worked together during the last few years of Mi’s life. We were able to tag team getting him to his doctor’s appointments, filling his prescriptions and purchasing his never-ending supply of Lipton iced tea and club crackers. I learned so much through this experience. We both shared his medical power of attorney. That piece of paper signed by a lawyer granted us the right to advocate for our grandfather and fight for his wishes during his last days.

The last few years have been hard work, but I am so grateful that Jeff and I were able to do it together. It was our honor and privilege to help him in his last days.

Here's one of my grandfather’s favorite jokes. He told this to me many times and each time he laughed like he had never told it before.

There was a feller going down a sidewalk dragging one foot and his hand on his hip.  Another came down dragging his foot.  The first feller said, “Shrapnel, Vietnam, ’68. You?”  The other feller said, “Dog poop, 50 ft., 15 seconds ago.”

The best frozen pizza ever

Yesterday I went to my grandfather's apartment to visit him and complete any Sarah/honey-do tasks he had for me.  This was the first time I've been without the children, and the atmosphere had changed because of it.  I was more relaxed, not worried about the kids being too loud or disturbing him and not worrying about needing to be a referee if the situation arose.
The first honey do I did was check his medicines to see what refills he needed.  Then I cleaned up his mail-order papers.  He had several empty envelopes around the house, so without speaking, I picked them up and threw them away.  One of them had some wetness on it, and I commented.  My grandfather was icing a swollen knee, so I understood the wetness to be from his ice pack.  I threw away the envelope anyway.  Five minutes later, when I was about to step out to go buy some tea, he asked where the wet envelope went to.  "It was on the floor," I explained, "So I went ahead and picked it up for you and put it in the trash."  Big mistake.  The next minute I was in the trashcan, digging it out.  Luckily the trash was clean.  I put that envelope right back on the ground following directions: "A little to the left.  Now up some.  Now flatten it out."  He was using the envelope to protect his carpet from the sweating ice pack.  I had forgotten that every single item, even something I consider trash, has importance in his world.
After I returned with his tea: "Make sure it's Nestea, because that bottle fits in my hand easier." he told me he had a pizza in the freezer that I could heat up for our lunch.  When the kids are around, I just drive through for all of us and the kids and I have a picnic on the floor while he eats in the tiny kitchen.  Today he wanted pizza, and I was happy to oblige.  It was a freezer-burned Totino's, which is by nature, absolutely disgusting, but who cares?  An old man wants a pizza, I'm happy to cook it for him.
I tried to preheat his oven, but I couldn't.  I didn't know if there was a safety button or latch that I needed to use.  He lives in a retirement apartment, so I thought it might be likely that the oven had some precautionary button on it.  All I could do was hit preheat and then the oven started beeping loudly and incessantly.  I got that to stop and tried again and again to no avail.  I told my grandfather, "You want pizza, so we're going to have pizza."  I went to the front desk and asked if they could tell me how to preheat the oven.  The ladies at the front desk assured me that they didn't know how to preheat the oven in their own kitchen, much less the one in my granddad's apartment.  They called the head of maintenance to come down.
Juan met me at the apartment.  I explained my problem and he looked at me confused.  He said, "All you do is press this and this" and then he started the incessant beeping.  The next thing I knew he called backup, was pulling the stove out of the wall, resetting it and eventually replacing the electronic panel.  After all that, we were able to preheat the oven.
The oven preheated and the pizza in, the next thing was to set the table.  My granddad has a tiny kitchen and no extra chairs.  He eats on a TV tray with wheels, but he arranged his walker and the TV tray so I could join him.  For my chair, I backed his electric scooter into the kitchen and swiveled the chair backward.  This took about 10 minutes to set up.
A broiler pan as an improvised pizza pan, a knife as an improvised pizza cutter, both of us hunched over a TV tray and some soggy, freezer burned pizza.  It was the best frozen pizza I've ever had.

Happy Birthday to Mi!

Today is my paternal grandfather's 86th birthday. In honor of his birthday, I thought I'd share some of his history with my readers. His name is Jerry McClellan Baker. McClellan is a family name, but I must ask again where it comes from. He was born in Emhouse, Texas, close to Corsicana (home of my grandmother). His father died when he was six and his mother moved him and all the kids to her parents house. They survived the Great Depression with a garden and lots of creativity. He dropped out of high school to join the Navy. He worked on a hospital ship in WWII and walked the streets of Hiroshima three days after the bomb hit. After the war, he met my grandmother, Margie, in Corsicana. When I asked him what he first liked about her, he said, "She was a girl." I asked him what she liked about him and he replied, "I imagine that she was glad I was a boy." He got his grandpa name when my cousin Jeff couldn't say the words "my granddad." Jeff could only come up with the word Mi, so from then on he was called that. I love my granddad because he's a saver. He saves all his beer cans for me to take to church to recycle. He has a little shelf in his hallway that he puts all his empty beer cans in, not because he can't put them in a bag himself, but because the kids love throwing them in the bag. He saves all his complimentary address labels for Claire to play with. Ensure bottles are repurposed as spittoons and a empty bottle of nosespray is filled with glass cleaner for his eyeglasses. Rather than buying new eyeglasses for himself, he wears my grandmother's old frames. He is also thoughtful. He makes sure he always has corndogs, steak fingers, and strawberries for each time we visit him. He make sure the garage door is lifted when we come to visit and often backs out his car so I can park in the garage to not overheat my car's interior. He listens to Rush Limbaugh every day and always has a political opinion to share with me. "Look at all that snow. How's that for global warming?" or "Michelle Obama took all the fat out of my gravy." These are entertaining to me and sometimes spark a thoughtful discussion. Sometimes I just listen. In his working days, he climbed electrical poles for TXU. He still wears his uniform daily, unless it's a special occasion. He broke his hip in the 1980s and walks with an elevated shoe and a cane or walker. His house is covered with pictures and he tells me often how satisfied with his life he is. I love to hear his old stories and actively try to record them. Whenever he would repeat a story, I used to stop him to let him know that I remember it and appreciate his stories, but I've stopped that. Now I just listen to them again and enjoy that he is telling them to me and that I don't have to remember them myself yet.

Visiting Mi

Today we went to visit my granddad on my father's side. We call him "Mi." He's been depressed since my grandmother died two years ago, so since I've quit working, we go spend the day with him every other Thursday. Somedays we help, somedays we visit, but today I think we just stressed out.

I should have gotten the kids back in the car and went home at the first sign of trouble. Within five minutes of arriving, Paul had dissected Mi's spittoon, and had used tobacco leaves on the corners of his mouth and in between his fingers. That was just a sign of more to come.

We spent an hour of searching my grandmother's recipes for the perfect meatloaf recipe. My grandfather is 83 and has failing eyesight. About a year ago he started wearing my grandmother's old glasses, but today even those weren't strong enough. He put on magnifying safety goggles to look through cookbooks.

While I was helping him, the kids were going crazy, getting into everything from the trash can to the DVD collection. After it became apparent the meatloaf recipe was like searching for Atlantis, I decided to make lunch. I usually discuss the menu with Mi, but today I decided to surprise him and make okra. We both love okra, and he has a freezer full of it, but rarely makes it because he's the only one there.

I turned on his ventahood but was unaware there was not an outlet for the smoke. The smoke detector went off, I laughed, explained, and went back to cooking. Then the Life Alert smoke detector went off. The house was vibrating with the alarm and a lady started shouting at us through the security panel. "Mr Baker! Mr. Baker! Are you okay? Are you okay?" Mr. Baker replied with a "I can't shut this damn alarm off. I can't hear you because this is too damn loud!" I eventually punched in his code and hung up on the lady.

Then the phone started ringing. The security company wanted to make sure he was okay. At this point I had also dissected the smoke alarm on the wall. My granddad came in to intervene on the cooking and told me to open the screen door. On her last visit, my mom accidentally broke the brackets to hold up the glass on the screen, so I had to open the door all the way. Claire started laughing and screaming that Paul was going to go on a walk in the street. He escaped out the front door at least five times before I was able to assemble the pack 'n' play and barricade him in.

Danger averted from lunch, we sat down and ate. Afterward, it was nap time. Mi has fond memories of kids sleeping in cribs in his house, so I try to always bring the pack 'n' play for Paul. This is the only place we use it, so Paul feels like he's in prison. He screamed for at least 20 minutes before I gave up and got him. I tried to lay him down with Claire and me on a pallet in the living room, but that was a struggle. He calmed down and then Claire announced that her and Curious George needed to go potty. They were gone for about 20 minutes, and then she came back with some mail and said it was hers. Then my granddad appeared and asked if we had a good nap. Nap? What's that?

I had just gotten Paul to sleep and then he saw Mi. He started jumping up and down, flapping his arms. No more nap for him. It was about 3 p.m. at this point, so I wrapped up the recipe conversation, offered to make the perfect meatloaf next time I come, and started cleaning. I guided Claire on picking up her toys and meanwhile, Paul was stringing stuff out. I picked up his mess, and then she had gotten out more books. I went in circles, and at 4 p.m., I finally caught up with both of them.

Claire went potty and then I followed. I always leave the toilet lid up after I'm done because it's so hard for my granddad to bend down. At our house, the lids stay down. Paul knows that and seized his unique opportunity. He crawled to the toilet as fast as he could and started splashing water. I picked him up, washed him off, and didn't set him down again in the house. I managed to get the kids to hug my granddad and get out of there without any more crises.

I was feeling bad because we had turned his normal, quiet house upside down, but when I hugged Mi bye, he told me, "I love you, Doll." I guess everything will be okay.