Ruminations

I’ve had so much time off in past weeks, due to an injury, that I after enough time ran out of pedestrian things to ruminate about, and dug into my greatest unfixable regret. I know that what I’m about to describe isn’t my fault, and I’ve known that for at least fifteen years, but still I feel guilty.

I’m named after a person of my grandparent’s generation, and as people of that generation are wont to do, he went ahead and died (I’ll refer to him as “he/him” from now on, in the face of all syntax conventions). I visited him in the hospital once, but he was asleep and we let him sleep. There was another later opportunity to visit him (I’m sure you know where this is going), but I was busy playing a video game, and had maybe reached a new boss or some such. My father later told me that he was awake, and was asking for me, but I never spoke to him after he was hospitalised.

It gets worse though, if only it was the above. Sharing names we were always close, we also lived close to each other, and I’m guessing he saw me as one of the grandchildren he never had, just like he looked after my father, and maybe saw him as one of the children he never had either. As I grew older I took to visiting him after school, it was on the way home as well, so it was nice and easy. He had lived an exciting and eventful life, as a policeman in general, and as a resistance fighter during the occupation.

Eventually as I hit my teenage years, and as he ran out of stories I hadn’t heard of before, we ran out of topics, and would often end up just sitting and staring at each other 😕. I visited him less and less often, until I stopped altogether, though I felt guilty every day when I bicycled past. This passed a year or two before he fell ill, and died of unrelated dehydration in the hospital (no, really, it was a minor scandal).

So why has it been nagging me for the past almost twenty years, why do I still feel guilty? At the funeral my father wanted to be supportive, because my father knew how close we had been, and how I regretted having abandoned him in the hospital (I didn’t expect him to die!), so my father told me how everyone in the family appreciated all the visits, how they had made him live on for years. All I heard, at the tender age of almost fourteen was: “He died because you stopped visiting him”, just when I missed him the most.

My father was trying to pay me a grand compliment, that I gave meaning to his life in his last few years, but I just felt the guilt pressing down on me. So what if it had just been awkward silence, if that’s what it would have taken (and not dying of thirst in a hospital).

With all these years of hindsight I don’t blame myself from a rational viewpoint, I gave him everything preteen/teenager me had to give, and I’m certain that he (paragon of virtue in my universe) would say that he had been ever grateful for my visits (though he would have liked to say properly goodbye). So why does it still bother me so? The lessons and emotions of our most vulnerable years cut deep, and I’ll never shake it; if anything it means that I’m always one to say goodbye, just in case.

My teenage years were not happy, I’m the kind of person who’d never want to be (that) young again, but this experience for all the misery it caused me, at least helped me to be a better person in general, and to deal with death in a healthier way. I don’t think most other things from my teenage years taught me anything but how awkward I can feel.

What still makes me laugh to myself, is the thought of him knowning that adult me would never ghost anyone, because my father without meaning to gave me a guilt trip at his funeral.