Ending

My grandfather died early, early on February fifth, which is why I've been missing from the web, etc. I took off from work on Tuesday to be with my family, on Friday for the funeral and yesterday to drive six hours to his burial and then six back so I could get to work today. I'm tired and sad...mostly for the end of such a presence in so many lives, and how lost so many people will feel without him as an anchor. My Grandad was the patriarch of our crazy, enormous, confusing family...we Boones are brilliant and difficult and full of love and intensity...we are something. He was the embodiment of the whole idea of Boone. He had eight children (more or less), 15 or 16 or maybe 17 grandchildren, my two girls, the great-grandchildren...and about a bajillion unofficially adopted kids and grandkids. He worked as an engineer, an oilman, a real estate agent and a crab plant owner, among other things...and could do literally anything. I never knew anyone as brilliant, although a couple of my young uncles come close.

My Grandad had suffered from heart disease my whole life. He had a quadruple bypass when I was 14, which popped before he left the hospital, close to 20 angioplasties, an experimental heart procedure which helped him a lot but wasn't approved because it killed everyone else they tried it on, lung cancer, brain cancer, diabetes and a few little strokes, probably. I had come to believe that he wasn't really going to die until recently, that soon the government would figure this out and start studying us...I still don't know why they weren't studying him. All of that and he lived to be eighty.

My Grandad was the patriarch in our family...I never knew such a man as he was...so rich in experiences and relationships. He was as kind as kind could be to me and my kids, and as loving, but I was aware that he was capable of being altogether different, as well...that he was the sort who would protect his family by any means. The sort of men I have chosen to know as an adult are a safer and more predictable and gentle sort of breed...they are more my speed...but it is easy to see them as pale, pasty shells of men next to someone like my Grandad. I am lucky to have known someone so rich with life, and very lucky to have been loved by him.