I welcome as my guest today, Melissa Amodeo.  I became acquainted with Melissa through the Orange County Christian Writers’ Guild of which we both are members.  We also attend the same church. Melissa resides in Orange, Texas with her husband, Tim, and their two daughters. I know you will be inspired by her stories this week and next week.

Martha asked me to write about childhood experiences with grief. Immediately, I knew I had to write my own personal experience in dealing with childhood grief and also that of my two children. I try to capture both stories of loss through the eyes of a child.

Today, I want to share my childhood experience in the death of my Grandpa Alex.

My relationship with my grandfather was a memorable one, though it was short lived. Every morning my grandfather would call me on his old rotary phone and ask if I thought the “Old Bird was going to catch the Coyote today?” I would say, “I don’t know Paw Paw.”  Every morning I would run down the walkway that led from my house to his and he would be waiting for me.  We would go to the kitchen and prepare a snack to eat as we watched “Our Show”. We would usually cut open a small bag of corn chips each, pour in some milk, and grab a spoon.  I would sit at my grandfather’s feet as we sat in front of the television and waited for the cartoon to come on.  Every day the show ended the same way; the Roadrunner never caught the Coyote.

My grandfather would laugh and laugh.  I can still see his dark chocolate skin and his pearly white smile as he tilted his head back and laughed at that “old bird.”  My grandfather would then tell me stories, some he made up, others I found out later were real childhood tales from books that I would read when I entered school, like the Tortoise and the Hare.  He told the best stories and he never tired of telling them. I never tired of listening.

My grandfather loved to fish and he had a boat, which he would let me play in. For hours I would sit in that boat and have adventures, pretending to take voyages around the seas of the world.  When the neighborhood kids found out about my games in the boat, they started playing in the boat as well. My grandfather told me I couldn’t play in the boat any longer because the other kids didn’t respect his boat like I did.  That made me sad.

I remember the day my grandfather passed away.  I was six years old.  My mother was pregnant with twins.  We lived in a small mobile home and my parents had bought a new bigger one.  My grandfather had told my dad if they needed to come through his yard with the new mobile home it would be okay, but not to hit his orange trees in the front yard. Well, when they pulled the new mobile home in, they had to go through my grandfather’s yard because the street was too narrow and they hit my grandfather’s orange tree.

Later that day, my grandmother came home early from work and she was crying. My uncle and aunt came over to my grandparent’s house as well. They were all crying. My mother told me that my grandfather had died.  I didn’t quite understand what that meant.  I knew it must not be good because everyone was very sad.

My two cousins and I were standing on the porch and they were crying and my cousin looked at me puzzled because I wasn’t crying and said, “Paw Paw is dead.  Don’t you know what that means”?   I just looked at him and I felt a twinge in my chest. Still I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew something terrible was wrong with my Paw Paw.

When the time came for the funeral, I saw my father cry for the first time.  I saw my grandfather dressed in a suit, lying in a shiny closed box.  He didn’t move.  I reached to touch him, but I pulled my hand back.  I looked up at my father and he was crying. My mother was crying as well. I started crying.

Days later, I kept looking out the window, waiting to see Paw Paw drive up.  He was a cement finisher and their yard was filled with many of his cement projects, such as: a turning stone cement table and a pink cement pad he parked his Cadillac on. I spent hours drawing on the cement with white seashells and tracing my fingers over the stones in the table because it reminded me of him.  I kept waiting to hear the phone ring.  It was silent.  Paw Paw never came back.

I asked Maw Maw when Paw Paw was coming back, and she said, “Aw chere babe. Paw Paw is not coming back; he died.  He gone,” and she hugged me.  I don’t remember much after that, but when I became an adult, my grandmother gave me a blue glass bottle shaped like a car that used to contain cologne that my grandfather used to wear.  When I was a girl, he collected them.  They always sat on a coffee table and I was told not to touch them. I always touched them!

I opened the bottle, it still smelled like his cologne, years later.  It brought back so many sweet memories of the time I spent with my Grandpa Alex.

Couldn’t you just visualize Melissa as a little girl wondering what was going on with Grandpa Alex?  Did her story bring back a memory from your childhood of the loss of a loved one?  If so, in the comment section, share it with us.

Join Melissa right here next week.  You don’t want to miss how she prepared her own children for death.