Thompson Hardware.

3.30.19

For three days now, we’ve been waiting for my grandfather to die. He’s unresponsive, not getting fluids, and his feet are turning blue. Yet his whiskers still grow and his heart beats on in what feels like the last stand of his brilliant life. A last stand that painfully drags on and on, delaying the final blow that would trigger the full expanse of our grief, but would also open the door to ultimately allow healing. For three days I’ve lived in limbo, existing in the space between my life with my grandpa and the life I have to lead without him. I can feel it there, insidiously creeping under the door and through the windows, unwanted and unwelcome. Yet I refuse to let go to of the world where he still builds things from scrap wood, collects appliances from estate sales, and gets on the radio every morning. I don’t know how to breathe in that new world—it doesn’t seem to come with any air.

I wish I had asked more questions and entertained more stories. I wish I’d recorded his whistling or the way he made up lyrics to Hank Williams. All I have is a voicemail, photos, and so much pain it feels like my body is being compressed into nothingness. I wish I’d called more or written more emails or did literally anything more than what I did. Because none of it feels like enough. None of those memories can fill this chasm that keeps opening up inside me. I keep thinking that maybe one more thing could have made this hurt less, one more moment could have made this somehow better. But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Grief doesn’t lessen if you fill a quota of good memories. There is no checklist of actions that will stop the waves from crashing over you when the inevitable comes. And the worst part is, no matter how many times you lose someone, you never get better at grieving. It’s just always bad and it never really leaves your body ever again.

Yesterday I laid down to sleep in the middle of the afternoon and I dreamed he was singing to me. I didn’t know the song, but it was just like him and just like those silly little songs he would make up while making breakfast in the kitchen. I was woken up by a phone call and for an instant I thought it had been real and that he had woken up and he had come back. Yet in the next beat, our family’s new reality came crashing back down on me as my mom talked to me on the other line from beside what has become his deathbed.

I keep getting up to do things—go through my closet, do the dishes, work on a project. I want something to do that will keep me from sobbing spontaneously or just listlessly moving about my apartment. Yet as soon as I begin, I lose all motivation and find myself staring into the dust of my apartment or strangling my cats with love. I think I’ve started about seven different shows on Netflix and only finished one.

4.9.19

This past weekend I said goodbye to the only Grandpa I’ve ever known and my heart is just so broken. He made the best breakfasts, could build you a house out of found objects from his shop, and always knew where the International Space Station was in the night the sky.

My amazing Grandpa was a hardware man, collector, badlands explorer, ham radio operator, pilot, silent movie aficionado, lefsa maker, record keeper, community leader, stick shift instructor, whistler and imaginative lyricist, cemetery sexton, Mr. Fixit, local historian, Norwegian joke enthusiast, amateur photographer, weather tracker, family man, inventor of curious things, storyteller, hula hooper, the best at hugs, and the kindest and most generous human who ever entered my life.

CQ CQ CQ… Grandpa, thank you for building our family on a foundation of love, for knowing how to fix my apartment sink while in another time zone, and for spending your life caring for others. I only wish you could have been here just a little longer. I love you to the Space Station and back. …73 W0RTK SK.

4.12.19

The day after I buried my Grandpa, I went out to the Badlands and found him again. He was home.

5.28.19

Been thinking a lot about this place recently. I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.

6.29.19

I stood on this rooftop and saw the Space Station move across the sky, the rings of Saturn, storms roll in, and some of the most beautiful prairie sunsets imaginable. I looked at the rain gauges, watched the bar next door throw out the bottles, and once my mom came and yelled at me at my cousin for laying out in tube tops without sunscreen. I’m going to miss this place more than I can bear to feel and I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to say goodbye.

7.8.19

I’m told it’s love transformed.

9.8.19

Sitting with feelings of grief and lost time alongside joy and treasured memories leaves a permanent weight somewhere in my chest cavity. It makes me want to absorb every inch and smell and texture and fraction of a moment, to preserve it by holding it all in my body at once. I would carry this place inside me—a home for this home.

Saying goodbye to Thompson Hardware, a store and a home that sheltered and grew five generations of our family, is just so fucking hard. I’m so insanely blessed to have a place, my people to love this much.