Life Before Death

My grandparents were royalty, or so I believed for the majority of my childhood.

Iceland has no kings; Iceland needs no kings.

But titles are only useful for first impressions; having the title doesn't mean you are what your title claims. Every country has kings and queens, whether they have that title, regardless of whether the country needs them.

In my eyes, my grandfather was a King, and my grandmother was a Queen. By definition, that should have made me a Prince, but that fact seems to have been lost on me at the time.

Our home in the fjord was their castle, being passed down through the centuries from the dawn of time, from generation to generation. Or so it seemed.

It was an imregnable fortress atop a hill, it was surrounded by a garden that grandmother tended. 

Each summer, she would pour her soul and time into it, and my grandfather would be pulled along with her. when he wasn't busy with work or tinkering with something in the barn next to the castle. 

One of my earliest childhood memories involves thinking about that castle, and fearing the weight implied in needing to continue passing it on to the next generation of the family, for infinity.

It implied our souls were bound to the concrete and the land, that we were merely different aspects of the castle rather than individuals.

That scared me as much as the thought of becoming an adult and having to choose vocations from what I could see in my immediate surroundings in the fjord. None of which sounded appealing.

My grandmother was tall and regal, by the standards of the day. She kept her hair dyed black, without being vain about it; that color simply suited her posture and wardrobe better. I remember her always dressing in some form of polka-dot dress, which had likely been fashionable in her youth, but the memory of a child is a fleeting thing that will happily fill in the blanks where you don´t remember the details as an adult.

My grandfather was slightly taller, but stocky and built like a bull without the horns, with blonde hair and blue eyes. He was a man of few words, dependable and slow to anger, even when warranted.  He was a Taurus, in case you were wondering. 

His blonde hair had gradually receded as he grew into adulthood, and by the time I was old enough to recognize him and name him grandfather, he had a hairline that would have been well-suited to a monastery. He frequently wore classic six-pence caps to cover it, or maybe just because the frigid winters were not kind to the naked skin on his head when left uncovered.

After their children left the nest, as well as their first two grandchildren, my grandparents remained the focal points of family Christmas and Easter celebrations until their family tree had grown to the point where it simply wasn't possible to seat everyone at the same table, or even multiple tables.

They lost a child to leukemia at the age of 7; there was a faded picture of him in the upstairs study, inserted into the last crayon drawing he had made. The drawing depicted the house they had lived in when he died, with stick-man family members lined up in a row at the bottom, smiling at the sun that could be seen peeking through the clouds in the upper corner.

I was too young to understand why, but I instinctively grasped that the lost son was not to be talked about except by my grandmother, and only then in passing references of her looking forward to seeing him again when she died.

I think something broke inside her when he passed. Their son had been gone a long time before I was born, but his presence could still be felt through the absence of something that should have been, but was lost.

Sometime later, she started taking prescription drugs to help dull the emptiness of the soul, and heart medication to quiet her racing heart.

What we were always told was that she had a problem with her heart; it was weak and frail, and she needed the medication. It was also provided as a reason for us kids to keep our voices down, so we wouldn't cause her heart to stop.

That lasted for decades, and it wasn't until another doctor started asking questions that she was taken off them and told she needed to see a psychiatrist, not a doctor. By that time, she'd effectively become addicted and suffered withdrawals as a result.

At that point, what felt to her like a heart attack was in fact the pain of 30 years of drugs leaving the body, and she wasn't used to her heart responding to stress and stimuli; she was more used to it always beating at the same rate, no matter what was happening around her.

When that happened, sometime in 2001, she was rushed into an air ambulance, as any ground-based ambulance would have taken hours to arrive and as long to return, hours which she might not have if this were a heart attack.

They were flown south to the capital, and that's when I learned about this from my sister for the first time, as well as the whole story behind it, as she understood it. 

I went to see them in the hospital afterwards, when she was ready to be discharged and needed someone to drop them off at my sister's, where they would be staying for a few days. They looked exactly the same as I remembered them from my childhood, 20 years ago; nothing had changed, not even their clothes.

They were glad to see me. and both gave me a big hug, which I wasn't used to from them. I'd lost touch with them at around the same time I started seeing Rose, not because I was deliberately avoiding them, but because I was overwhelmed with everything else that was going on in my life at the time.

Due to how quickly they had left, they didn't have anything with them, and they didn't even know if they'd locked the doors behind them when they'd rushed out. At the time, nobody locked their doors in the fjord; there was no need. Burglaries aren´t much of a problem in small communities.

I volunteered to drive my grandfather's car up north to fetch their essentials. Grandfather would accompany me, as would Elyssa, as I'd started spending time with her at regular intervals again, after her mother and I agreed to try and put the past behind us.

It was an uneventful ride; we talked about everything and nothing. Nothing important, nothing dangerous, but just talking to him and hearing his voice was enough for me. The content didn't matter, not now, not ever again. I was just glad to spend time with him.

When we arrived in the fjord, after a 7-hour drive, and arrived at the castle, it wasn't the fortress I remembered from my childhood. The castle had grown smaller somehow, as had the hill and the garden.

It still felt like home, but it wasn't my home. It was just a fragment of my past, seeing it again felt like visiting an old friend that you didn't remember what you had in common with, but were happy to see again.

Grandfather hadn't been able to get a decent haircut in months; he'd been used to either having grandmother either buzz his electric trimmer around his head a few times, every couple of months, or visit the local barber. The trouble was, the barber had retired, and the replacement was a hardresser.

So he asked me if I would help with that. I'd never done something like it before, but it felt like a moment of vulnerability and trust, so I felt I couldn't say no.

It only took a few minutes, and in my own humble opinion, the outcome wasn't bad.

I might not have won any awards for the trim, but he was pleased with it, and that was the only thing that mattered.

It felt like giving him the last rites, even if he had a couple of more years left before he eventually passed. You never know the next time you'll see your loved ones; today might be the last. Remember that. Life is too short for anger or petty irritation over meaningless things.

It is a treasured memory from my grandfather, which is why I'm writing it down to remember it.

Good things and bad things happen in life; we're just wired to remember the bad ones more clearly, to avoid them happening again. The good things only leave an impression if we are conscious about them and spend time appreciating them.

We need to remember the good things as well as the bad, otherwise we'll only be focused on survival without purpose and meaning.

We need to be mindful and conscious about the good things, or they'll be lost.

Without mindfulness, we become simple, mindless automatons, whose only purpose is to avoid being eaten by the tiger or the lion.