Un-Obituary for My Grandpa Schnack

It's been a hard weekend for my family. My Grandpa Schnackenberg passed away on Friday.

Mark and Nathan and the pups and I already happened to be on the way to Huntersville for
the Latta triathlon, so we continued in that direction. We were able to help my mom with some initial arrangements and have dinner with her Friday night. We were not able to sleep well (I didn't sleep at all, actually), but I ended up doing the swim and run portions of the tri the next morning anyway, because I needed the distraction and apparently I didn't realize the level of sheer exhaustion that would hit me like a wall afterwards. I was also not able to avoid stepping in horse poop on the run trail. That's right: my Grandpa died and I stepped in horse poop. Pretty much sums up the weekend.

We are now back in Raleigh; we needed to get some nicer clothes and things for the memorial service tomorrow, and we'll hit the road again tonight and come back home tomorrow afternoon. (Because staring at the miles of interstate between here and Huntersville for three hours a day, four days in a row, is the perfect cure for grief.) Needless to say, we are tired.

Grandpa's obituary ran in this morning's Observer. It's nice, I guess, but have you ever noticed that after reading these things, you still don't have a sense of who the person was? All those facts and relatives and career moves and alma maters don't capture him. I don't know if there's a word for the opposite of obituary. If there is, it fails me now, as does any motivation to try and figure out if such a word even exists. But whatever the opposite of obituary is, this is it.

An Un-Obituary for Grandpa, by his Apple Dumpling

My Grandpa was blessed with almost 91 years on this earth. He was a strange combination of jovial and neurotic -- he loved Jeopardy, coffee cake, eating breakfast foods for dinner, McDonald's coffee, and had a near-obsessive fear of running out of Kleenex (I don't think he knew how to go into a store and not buy a box or two; on any given day he could probably tell you where it was on sale for cheapest, and he didn't mind spending $5 on gas to drive across town and save 25¢ per box). He loved golf, liked bowling and chess, and sailed multiple times on the QE2. He rigged up a contraction to mute television commercials long before tv sets came standard with remote controls or mute buttons. He wasn't particularly ahead of his time, technology-wise (our attempt at getting him to use email was extremely short-lived, and he used his old electric typewriter for decades after it was actually efficient), but he loved his VCR, and recorded oh-so-many shows and programs -- anything and everything he thought we might want to watch (we didn't, for the record, except for the Sound of Music -- and I can never be grateful enough for the introduction of that tape into my life).

The obit tells you that Grandpa died at home, but it doesn't explain what a blessing that was. He would have been miserable in a sickbed, at a hospital. He was one of those people who needed to be able to up and go when he got an inkling. He loved cruise control and set it at about 40 mph no matter the conditions he was driving in -- neighborhoods, interstate, rain, whatever -- with his poodle Tammy in his lap. Grandpa named every car he ever owned (except maybe this last one), and you could always find some sort of candy in a little tin box somewhere in the front seat. You know, nestled amongst the kleenex boxes. Necco wafers and Werther's are the two candies I remember best. He spent his last day on earth running around town (despite the fact that he wasn't supposed to be driving), even visiting a bakery -- no doubt for a danish or coffee cake of some kind. We should all be so fortunate to spend our last days really living.

The obit doesn't tell you that he was somewhat compulsive, about little things -- before he went to bed at night, every light switch had to be in the right position (lights that could be controlled by more than one switch, causing the potential to mess up his "system" at the end of the day, were a major stressor), and he spent decades setting the table for breakfast before he turned in for the evening. He was a firm believer in well-done toast and locking doors.

The obit mentions that he was a regular at Lowe's in Huntersville, but it doesn't tell you how very important that part of his routine was. How he went there every day he felt well enough, sat near the check-out registers (in a chair he had purchased and kept at the store for just that purpose) people-watching with Tammy in his lap. How he was sort of a local legend for being "the nicely dressed elderly gentleman" there (my mom will argue that nicely-dressed part until she's blue in the face, mostly because of a favorite yellow sweater that he refused to part with even after it was holey and ragged and she ripped a sleeve off to encourage him to trash it... he just took it to have it mended and kept wearing it, one sleeve too short). That on most days, he had just been to Wendy's for lunch, and that he was loyal enough to his burger there that even after he found a spider on his lettuce one day, it wasn't enough to chase him away from the restaurant forever -- just to start ordering his burgers sans lettuce.

The official obit tells you that he was a WWII veteran, but it doesn't tell you about the time during his soldier days that he was swimming somewhere off the coast of northern Africa (Tripoli, maybe?) and thought he was standing on a sandbar, but really it turned out to be the shell of a giant snapping turtle. Or about how he played cards with fellow veteran Banks McFadden, and was pleased when Mark went to Clemson because of that card game. It tells you that Grandpa was a pilot, but doesn't tell you about the part where he was so conflicted about dropping bombs down from his plane that several missions were apparently botched. I don't know the exact circumstances of his discharge, but I do know that any misgivings about warfare he might have had, those just make me love him more. I'm proud that he served our country and I'm simultaneously proud that he knew how ugly war can be, even for the "winning" side.

The obit mentions that he retired to Myrtle Beach, but it doesn't mention that he didn't actually seem to like the beach. He was much more interested in taking us grandkids to waterparks, or eating at the gazillions of k&w-type cafeterias there (to cater to his generation, I'm sure) or any place where you could throw peanut shells on the floor (not sure if he was fascinated by this or horrified by it, but he found it worth mentioning and worth going). How in the early years of living in Murrells Inlet, they evacuated to stay with us in Charlotte for Hurricane Hugo, but then our neighborhood sustained worse damage than theirs at the beach.

Grandpa's obituary names a lot of relatives, including his father who was a relatively important politician and judge in Chicago. What it doesn't tell you is how Grandpa seemed (through stories and what I know of his own choices) to struggle to meet his parents' be somebody expectations and his own desire to just lead a simple family with simple honor. It tells you that he loved his wife, but it doesn't tell you that they were married 57 years before she passed away ten years ago, or how he never took his wedding ring off since before WWII, ever. It doesn't tell you how hard they fought to get that family he wanted to lead, their struggles to carry a child full-term -- a healthy child. Or about the bureaucracy frustrations involved in adopting two daughters, and the misery of burying one of them when she was barely grown up. It doesn't tell you how insanely proud he was of the one remaining daughter, my mom -- her musical gifts, her intelligence (and her choice to use those brains to heal people), her strength, and her devotion to him as she added onto her house so that he could spend his golden years near her. How he gave all his grandchildren nicknames (Apple Dumpling, Cupcake and Butch -- please don't ask how we went from Cupcake to Butch, I will never understand it myself) and how he never gave up on those nicknames (the last letter he sent me was addressed to Apple Dumpling Goettsch; I wish I were kidding). How happy he was to have lived long enough to see a great-grandson born, and know that a great-granddaughter is on the way.

It doesn't tell you how he was obsessed with Velcro and used it for anything and everything -- latching cabinets, keeping pens stuck to his car dashboard or coffee table, mending pants, attaching remote controls to his recliner, you name it.

How he used scotch tape and pushpins to affix newspaper clippings and family photos and hand-written signs (like keep door locked and no smoking - oxygen in use) to the walls and table and other furniture, covering pretty much every square inch of his house.

How he would sit on the couch with us grandkids and watch out the window for anyone exciting to drive by. (I don't think anyone ever did.)

How he used a mileage-earning credit card until his dying day, even though he had been on a plane only once in the last decade, and had no plans to travel again.

How he believed that being half black didn't make you black. He insisted that while Obama can claim the titles of first African-American president (since he is of Kenyan descent), and first minority president, he doesn't get to claim first black president.

How he would entertain us grandkids by predicting the exact time on the car clock when we would arrive somewhere (and always somehow being right -- the fact that he had some degree of control over how quickly we got there seemed to escape us, and we were endlessly impressed with this trick).

How he wanted a neutral word to use to refer to homosexuals (mostly to protect his generation's original meaning of gay from pejorative undertones), so he decided to just make one up -- and settled on zank.

How when I was a toddler he took a bite of my blue double-bubble ice cream (not a lick like I apparently told him), and never fully recovered from the tantrum that followed.

How the only drugstore he liked to use was Walgreen's -- something about his mom knowing the family back in the day in Chicago and how they would do one-hour photo printing even in the middle of the night. Not that he ever needed to take advantage of this.

How he called TCBY "tick-bee" and ordered his treats topping-first.

These are the things that made him Grandpa. Not relatives and facts and figures, but laughs and eye-rolls and memories. And I hope that by capturing a few of them here, I am helping to ensure that the memories live on... for my family's sake, for my kids' sake, and for my own sake.

We will miss you, Grandpa.

PSA

I'm not sure if you saw the news earlier in the week, but President Obama has been sworn into office.

Which means he officially won the election in November.

Which means the campaign is over.

Which means you can take the Obamamama sticker off your car now.

Thank you, that is all.