My grandpa died this week.

It wasn't a surprise necessarily because he had been in and out of ICU and in the hospital for a month... and because he has been old and weak for many more years than he should have been.

But it was Grandma Madyline that we were worried about at the moment. My grandma Madyline who had had a stroke 10 years ago and is still trapped inside a body that doesn't work... and that broken body is now in conspiracy with her mind and both are beginning to fail her even more. Playing cruel tricks on each other.... Infections and seizures and loss of memory and sometimes she doesn't understand or remember that the tubes they have inserted into her body are there to provide help - and so she pulls them out.

But it was my Grandpa John, who was feeling better and asking for strawberry ice cream again, and then... just isn't. I remember my Grandpa John growing tomato plants - so anxious to be the first one with a ripe fruit that he'd start them indoors months before it was warm enough to transplant them outside. I remember my Grandpa John had this coy little smile with mischievous eyes, as if he had just played a joke on you... but as a kid, I never really knew what the joke was. My Grandpa loved attention. My Grandpa also was quite good at reinventing himself. He had interests all over and whatever muse he followed grew under his great energy. But I only knew him when he was old ...and tired... and medicated. Perhaps it was my youth, or perhaps he just had wrestled with so many lives in his time... he seemed older than his years should have allowed.

Today I was thumbing through a notebook from my room and I found a page where I had doodled my Madyline's name in glittery colored gel pens, over and over again. I paused and wondered. What was John like when he was young? When he fell in love with this ravishingly beautiful girl named Madyline.... did he doodle her name over and over again as he dreamed of life with her?