A couple months ago, I found out that my maternal grandfather had terminal pancreatic cancer. He died on December 24th. I'd been wanting to write something about it here ever since, but I kept procrastinating on that. I'm at a loss trying to come up with anything meaningful to really say, and I guess I didn't really know the man very well, and that most of my memories of him kind of blur together and don't make much sense. I think that's because I saw a lot more of him as a kid and only spoke with him a handful of times once I got older, and also because he was generally pretty quiet anyway. Maybe it's just the way my brain works. I don't know. Recently, my mom and my sister were talking about something and it occurred to me that a story I thought was about my grandpa was actually about my mom's grandpa, my great-grandpa. So that was something I probably had mixed up in my head for years.
After the news sunk in, I had some strange vivid recollections of reading Robert Heinlein's "Future History" stories and seeing the plot point about how the Howard Foundation had been orchestrating matchmaking between people who had four living grandparents, something that wasn't as common back in the 19th century. I remember musing that I still had four living grandparents, and that I was older than the characters they were talking about. It's a totally meaningless distinction related to something that wasn't even important in the stories I was reading, but it was the first thing that popped into my head immediately on learning that my grandpa had died. So that's weird? I'm weird.
His name was Earl Thomas Ashton Junior. At first, I only knew of him as "Grandpa." Looking back, I wonder how well I understood the various relationships and individuals in my extended family. My paternal grandparents were "Nonny and Papa" by their own choosing, and that was all I knew them as. I think I only ever met one great-grandparent on my father's side, and she was "Grandma Vi" to me. My maternal grandmother was (and is) "Grandma Mickey." My maternal grandfather was "Grandpa", but his parents were "Grandma and Grandpa." That meant two different men (father and son) were, in my childhood, known simply as "Grandpa" to me. But I think that if there was ever a need for clarification, the elder of the two was stipulated to be "Great Grandpa." My maternal grandparents divorced while my mom was still a child, and at different points she lived with each of them and a step-parent, and with her grandparents (the same ones that were "Grandma and Grandpa" to me). Grandpa had two children with my mom's step-mother (I met my mom's half-siblings, but never met their mother). But by the time I showed up, Grandpa had divorced and remarried again. At least I think it was before I was born? I can't remember. It would have been in the 1980's, anyway. Since Grandpa's wife's name was Rose and since there was already a "Grandma" and a "Grandma Mickey" and a "Grandma Vi", it made sense that I knew her as "Grandma Rose." That was the way of things for me and for my sister, Rachel, going into the early 1990's. But then our little brother, Josh, heard about "Grandpa and Grandma Rose" and assumed that this meant "Grandpa Rose and Grandma Rose." He was corrected, but Grandpa thought it was hilarious and just kind of rolled with it, so it became a thing. He was "Tom" or "Tommy" to most people, but within my family, he was "Grandpa Rose."
As a kid, I remember seeing him hanging out with my dad a lot. I remember that he was always the one with a video camera at family functions, and that I got to see a tape of a party for my own first birthday, with lots of friends and relatives present, but not Grandpa (because he was the one holding the camera, of course).
In 1999, my Uncle Troy (Grandma Rose's son) started having kids. When I was in high school, they moved to Port Townsend, so they weren't close to where I was living, but still within driving distance (it was probably a 2.5-hour drive). On multiple occasions, Grandpa and Grandma Rose drove all the way up from San Bernardino to Port Townsend to visit their grandkids there, without me seeing them or even knowing they'd been in Washington until after the fact. I remember acting like it didn't bother me at the time, and reasoning that it's not like I was entitled to anything. But really, it did bother me. And I guess I kind of thought, "I'm not in their lives anymore." So I wasn't. And maybe that's part of why this is weird. They couldn't be bothered to keep in touch with me, so I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch with them. Perhaps that says something about me, though. Rachel seemed to maintain a lot more contact with them. They visited Rachel's apartment and I saw them there, probably some time in the late 2000's. I was going to say that was the last time I saw him, but I suspect that we were both at the same family reunion once or twice in the early 2010's, briefly. In fact, I remember that there was one in Oregon where I showed up with Rachel, and Grandpa and Grandma Rose were there when we arrived, but they left soon after so that they could drive up to Port Townsend to see their grandkids there. Yikes, this makes me sound bitter, but I promise I'm only just now even recalling this! I hadn't even given it any thought for years and years.
Well, this is awkward and I can't think of a good conclusion, so I'm going to quit while I'm not ahead.
