There is no one like a grandparent.
They give unconditional love no matter what.
My Papaw and I had a special bond from the very beginning. I was a curly haired red head and I had his heart. I was born the year that he turned 50. We shared decade beginning birthdays in decade beginning years.
It didn’t matter what he and my dad argued about or talked about, he always had a spot next to him where we would sit and watch the minutes pass on his rolex.
He stopped smoking when I was very young because I had asked him too. My parents impressed upon me, that he would die young if he didn’t. He made it to 88 years & 9 months. Thats pretty damn good.
I would make homemade fudge just for him, every time they came to visit. Standing in front of the stove for hours to make sure it would be just right.
He walked me down the aisle to get married when my own father wouldn’t even show up to my wedding.
My Papaw was my hero.
Its hard to describe what it is like to lose that person. Most daughter’s choose there father as that rock. I didn’t have that but I had my Papaw. I hate to cry but the pain in my heart is so much worse than what I dealt with in any other loss. I lost the person who was truly the proudest of me. The person who believed that I could do anything. I lost a piece of me….
When I divorced Papaw promised me that there was someone as good as (he) who would love me, like he loved my Grandma. I hope he is right. Even though they dealt with infidelity early on in their marriage, my Papaw never quit fighting for their marriage. Not once. Neither did my Grandma. “Marriage isn’t 50/50.” He told me. “It’s 100/100.” The first part of my marriage was 100/100, frankly the rest of it and the relationships following remained unequal. I never got to tell him that I understood. I never got to tell him how critical he had been in my life.
He taught me the die hard determination to ‘figure it out’ no matter what happened. That you only lose when you give up. He had a metal pail in his garage that was full of screws. He had taken apart a truck and put every single screw in that bucket. He said that he didn’t think at the time that he would need to know which screw went to which part, but he figured it out.
My Papaw was a baller before it was cool to be one. My Papaw was my hero.
