The Last Visit

Chapter 5 of the Founder's Journey: The Last Visit

Imagine the terror of knowing you might die the next day. You're young, in your early 20's. You're overseas fighting for your country but you do so with a wrench and mechanical skills more regularly than with a rifle, pistol, or any other kind of direct weaponry.

You repair the planes that will go charging back into combat as soon as you can fix them. You refuel them. You clean the blood from the cockpit. Usually you are more likely to die drowning than in direct conflict with the enemy.

It's been close - touch and go on a few occasions, being stationed on an aircraft carrier with kamikaze fighters narrowly missing your ship a time or two since you're in the heart of the fleet. Upon arrival they have you take position on land - such is the role of the Marines.

The difference is this time it isn't a skirmish unlikely to get significant threats incoming to sink your craft. You've been told the next day is likely be your last because you've found yourself at the apex of the war, predicted to be overrun and plunged into the heart of battle. On a beach in Iwo Jima as the enemy fleet approaches.

On this last day in port, you're burying your journal with final words for your friends and family back home. Letting go of the sense of likelihood of survival - you are now the dead walking, fully expecting your last breaking dawn.

You're one of the many heroes of the pacific, but it wouldn't be until years later that you really felt like one. The truth would be you never really do because the savage horror of things you had witnessed, of the tasks you'd had to engage in. Experiences you expected to go to your grave without exposing to protect the innocence of your loved ones.

No... being a hero wasn't why you were there. You were there because you believed in your country and you had an ethic that sprouted directly from learning to work and sell and hustle during the hardest economic crisis to survive through that the nation had ever experienced, having struck when you were just a boy.

Obviously my Grandfather survived to have a late night chat many years later with his grown kids, my Dad and Aunt, and their spouses, explaining things at that table that even my Grandmother hadn't been told, about his experiences in the war.

Grandpa knew he was sick at the time and that his days were probably limited. So, knowing his mortality was once again knocking, he finally opened up and bared the legacy of his soul. Cancer treatment was still hopeful at the time, but it wasn't taking well.

I knew him as the one to try to inspire me throughout my years of school, when I had decided that I was a square peg the system was trying to spank through a round hole.

Despite all my efforts to program my mind and behavior to improve, I had no idea how weak I was to the call of the regular and easier dopamine hits I would get in so many other ways as soon as the class hours would end. My capacity to choose to focus on homework wasn't dissimilar to the inability of a naked person in the snow to simply believe themselves warm enough to function.

Grandpa believed in me though. Like many, he could see a kid that was smart but incapable for whatever reason of fully applying himself. So Grandpa had taken to concepts like paying for good grades, positive reward mechanisms, systems that even if they didn't work any better than the stick, were at least carrots instead.

Grandpa was a believer, unlike everyone else in my life, in positive reinforcement. And it made me feel like more than any other relative, he loved me. He and I would talk with respect rather than as if I was getting lectured. We had an ongoing pen-pal connection I didn't have with any other.

Everyone in my family showed love, but he knew love to be something you gave to someone else, not just as a feeling you had.

Dad benefitted from this and in retrospect it had become almost a form of worship in the depth of respect it earned. Sometimes that's the very rock upon which my Dad and I can find a core and unbreakable agreement around still.

I don't know how long it took to realize how much more comfortable I felt around he and my Grandmother 'M' I felt, in contrast to my Mom's side of the family. All I know is that I did.

Grandma and Grandpa had an amazing garden in the smaller backyard - the carrots were straight out of the ground the best snacks nature could offer. He often tooled about and to his last years he kept learning and growing, expanding his crafts skills into woodworking.

I owned, for the longest time, a chest he made, his 'hope' chest, within which, after his passing, I placed all of my keepsakes of my deepest emotional memories. Pictures, hat collection, sports cards, coins, letters, cards, it was within his love, expressed as a simple wooden box, that everything I most deeply cared about was stored.

When we arrived a day after my first Christmas, I believe he made the next morning what would be the signature thing I'd think of him for as a kid, his special shaped pancakes, obviously of note among them being Mickey Mouse pancake shapes.

Mornings in their house was magical no matter what we were having for breakfast, whether it be the unusual grapefruit or tangerines, or a bowl of cereal no other kid was yet to even know about.

Grandpa spent his post-war life as a sales person for General Mills, helping it to eventually become the giant corporation it eventually became.

He often had 'test' boxes of new products, like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Honey Nut Cheerios, and the entire line of Halloween themed cereals like Count Chocula. Yes, you can thank me for my early feedback to the company on these products.

He was a gold mine of ALL of the classic sales affirmations. The early bird gets the worm. Where there's a will there's a way. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Success is about finding a need and filling it. Winners never quit and quitters never win. Mind the 6 P's - Proper Prior Planning Prevents Pisspoor Performance.

The war shifted at the last minute and his position wasn't overrun as they had expected it would be. He had retrieved his journal I believe but I have no idea what has become of it now. That allowed us to have a final dinner with him many years later on a Christmas Eve.

Grandma's masterpiece knitted Christmas village was softly lit to the side of a long table with my Aunt and Uncle, Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa at the head.

Over the years Grandma's cookies had become a legend of their own, a collection of Snickerdoodles, Lebkuchens, Butter Cookies, Pecan Sandies, Oatmeal Raisins, Black and Whites, Candycanes.

There was usually happiness at the table when it was like this, but this year, just as we were preparing a move to take place later during the summer before my Freshman introduction to High School in a new town, Grandpa clearly wasn't feeling too healthy.

We knew his Lymphoma treatments weren't taking anywhere near as well as we'd hoped.

Just before we dove into the turkey, he stood to give a short thanks to us all for being there and how much it meant to have his whole family together with him, and he collapsed in the middle of the speech, as if scripted by a Hollywood writer.

We were all devastated of course, but soothed by the fact we could get him to the hospital. From there, the rest of the visit was a family experience we all shared, hugs and tears going around for weeks.

He didn't have me in to visit him directly more than once from there. He didn't want me to remember him this way and yeah, he was pretty shockingly bruised and swollen and not at all himself but that isn't the moment that haunts me.

I can put that image of him aside and remember him as the laughing, vibrant, wise old man who got up on the roof the second Christmas we spent there, with sleigh bells and hooves to clop across overhead as if Santa had just visited and was taking off in the middle of the night. I can easily remember him as the one we'd gone camping with quite often, the one that argued softly with Grandma as they did the dishes together as they always did.

No... what haunts me to this day is how after we had to give up and return home and go back to school and spend weeks trying to juggle life's normal demands, hearing of sudden hopeful recovery, then another collapse that quickly returned him to the hospital, I had a dream.

In this dream, I knew he was there. He wasn't in body, in person so much until near the end of it, but more of a pink cloud surrounding me, embracing me, showing me the fullest extent of how much he loved me. His words were clear, unlike the normal fluid rationality one experiences in many dreams.

He told me that he wished he could be there to help me through the years to come that would be so challenging. He told me that he worried about me above everyone else in the family - that he knew his inability to hold on would make things very difficult, that it would lead me to greater resentments and rebellions, but to try to understand that there was a plan and a purpose in everything and that he could see that now.

He made it clear, this was something like a last phone call he was allowed to give.

Expressing how I found it shocking that he wasn't spending this opportunity for a final goodbye to Grandma or Dad, he said he could really only spend this one last moment on me before having to move on and to understand his concerns for my future were why he selected me for it. It was a very clear discussion and in the pink mist we sat together and he hugged me goodbye.

I awoke to the phone ringing - these were still the days of landlines and one phone in a home, even if it was connected remotely at short range to the wall jack on which it recharged. I couldn't hear the hushed words in the other room through the soft hot tears running down my cheeks, but when my Mom came to the door, I told her before she could say it, "I know".

If there was ever a CLEAR indication to me of a proof of the afterlife, it was this moment. You can't begin to tell me that this experience was just a coincidence - that I woke up to the pending knowledge he could be passing away soon and recreated this dream in all its clarity in immediate reconstruction as I logically deduced what a late night phone call may have meant. Sure, that might have been the case, except the dream was real. You and I can accuse my mind of patching holes elsewhere. This wasn't that.

I played it over and over in my mind to remember every detail I could and while that's tough for dreams, it was as lucid a dream as I could ever remember having. This was not the hashing of fears or pure symbolism, though the pink cloud of love was clearly allegorical and obvious in its meaning. The discussion we had was in words, English, and it wasn't the content I would've expected, not at all what I would've expected him to tell me.

As an early teen, I couldn't possibly understand what future vision he'd been shown of what I'd soon be experiencing, but I can certainly in retrospect see why his death worried him on my behalf.

It hurt like nothing I'd ever before experienced. The mortality expressed and the fact that it came to strike through my most beloved family member changed me deeply, stripped me of tremendous lifelong optimisms and was the pain that awakened in me a dour new nihilistic outlook towards any concerns about trying to live investing in the future.

I took it deeply to mean, in full resentment, that no matter how much one took care of their health, death can and will take us in its chosen time, regardless. I later discussed that in deep heart-to-heart discussions with friends and girlfriends during high school.

One of the deepest ironies is that Grandpa's passing led to my very conscious choice to smoke tobacco.

Though I didn't realize it until later, Grandpa had smoked much of his life too. Cigs were standard issue in military lunches back then. When it became apparent they were damaging to health, he quit and inspired my Dad to never smoke a day in recognition of the money saved and health recovered.

Grandpa had often proudly spoken of that choice. Daily, he squirreled away what he would've spent on cigarettes'. In doing so, he saved enough to proudly buy a boat - and my Dad's childhood became one of mastering trick skiing.

That had inspired my Dad to also buy us a boat, which led to waterskiing and fishing and fun for us all. So many spirals of pattern in all of this. I never was as good at wake jumping, though.

Nevertheless, now that I'm engaging my memories to scour through the library of them to find the founding moments of key core beliefs, this was, without question, one of them.

It was from that pink dream that the afterlife ceased to be a fantasy. It was no longer debatable, now an unquestionable reality. Grandpa had earned the right to go on beyond as he passed, not to be stuck here with unfinished business, but his last act in the afterlife was contacting me during a dream.

I thought I saw him in my dreams later, but it wasn't a pretty kind of thing - wasps were calling his face home now and he wasn't there to talk to me and I took it to mean it was time to let go of the sting of his loss. Perhaps he WAS there to pass that message through, but it wasn't the same obvious discussion with a departed spirit as this dream had been the night we were told of his passing.

There are many reasons we call them the 'greatest generation'. He embodied all of those reasons for me.

And if I ever saw a ghost for real, it was he.