Well, this is a post I've been putting off for a few weeks now ... without trying to sound dramatic about it, I've made several attempts at starting to write something, just to dissolve into an emotional mess and scrap the whole thing. Now that enough time has passed for me to get myself together, here goes.

My grandfather, Harry J. Morrell, passed away in the early hours of Feb 14th. He died at home, in the middle of the night, at the age of 87, which is more than many of us could ask for. Having just seen and spent time with him at the holidays, it's still hard for me to believe how quickly he declined. Though he was diagnosed with lymphoma shortly after our visit, I truly believe that the cancer simply gave his mind an excuse to finally let go of the body that he saw failing him. He was tired of not being able to get around, frustrated at not being able to take care of himself, and probably scared watching himself deteriorate. None of us imagined that he would go so rapidly, but I think he knew ... when we said our goodbyes at Christmas, his was definitely of the "final" variety.

The visitation and funeral were up in Michigan; he was buried in the most beautiful spot in the little cemetery just down the street from his house in the town he'd lived in his whole life. And despite one of the worst winter storms of the season, friends and family came from all over to honor him. I always knew that he was a wonderful grandpa and that he was always fun to be around, I just never realized that everyone else thought so, too. He was the epitome of small-town friendliness ... he knew everyone, was never bashful about introducing himself to people and entertaining perfect strangers with stories, and everyone who met him liked him. His best friend Jack told me that grandpa "only ever met strangers once; the second time they met, they were friends." Only as an adult do I realize how rare that is in a person. I find myself guilty of the "mind my own business" mentality: we've lived in our community for more than 5 years, and there are neighbors a few doors down that we've never really even spoken to! Sure, it goes both ways, but what I've learned from grandpa is that if you extend a hand, you almost always get a handshake in return. And more than that, being part of your community becomes part of you. (And when your nearest family is, say, 2000 miles away, your friends and neighbors are the people you rely on day to day - they become a family, in a way.)

My older brother Randy and I were grandpa's first grandkids - he was just 58 when Randy was born, and he still got around pretty well when we were young. I have wonderful, idyllic memories of riding bikes with grandpa, helping him "drive" the lawn mower, walking through the wooded property near the old farm where he grew up and raised his own family, putting on grandma's oversized galoshes and going marsh berry picking in the spring, and of course fishing. (If grandpa could have loved anything more than his own family, it was fishing. I wasn't a very good fisher ... grandpa was a very patient man, but his patience with me in that boat ran out about as quickly as my attention span did. Thankfully, Randy was a much better fishing companion!) If grandpa was outside doing something, so were we. Now, most of you know that I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, a far cry from rural southwest Michigan. And many of you know that I'm a city girl - I need coffee shops, restaurants, and 24-hour grocery stores around me. But at the same time, I never feel more at peace than when I'm out in the middle of nowhere, and I can't really explain to my "city" friends how poetic it feels to see a dilapidated barn in a corn field in the late spring's early morning fog. Or one of those breathtaking red, purple, and indigo winter sunsets with nothing between you and the sky but barren fields and leafless trees. And that love must come from all of my incredibly fond childhood memories of grandma and grandpa's house. As much as my parents may have tried to drain my love of the outdoors from me with endless forced death marches through America's finest national parks (they called it "hiking" and "summer vacation", haha), I'm still the same kid who loved going nightcrawler hunting with grandpa on summer nights after a good rain. I just use more expensive shampoo now.

But I think the best gift grandpa ever gave me was the ability to get to know him all over again through the eyes of Nick. How was I to know that not all grandpas were as great as mine? Grandpa was the consummate practical joker and found humor in every situation, even the bad. He was incredibly clever and quick-witted and had the most astounding head for numbers of anyone I've ever met. And boy could he tell stories! The most incredible thing about it is that he could tell the same story three times in the course of a day (and maybe a hundred times overall), but each time it was like he was telling it for the first time: he didn't try to come up with the most amusing and clever way to say it and then repeat it over and over verbatim - every time, it was a different part of the story that was funny or it was a different detail that he recalled with laughter. (And my GOD, his laughter!! Nick and I always joked that when you get me really going, I laugh just like grandpa ...) To watch Nick get to know grandpa, adult to adult, and see and appreciate all of the wonderful things that made him such a great grandfather and person was incredible. And for me to see grandpa in a whole new way, as a man, not just "grandpa," has made me realize that people like him are rare in this world, and just how lucky I am to have had him as my grandpa.

Nick and I didn't have a chance prior to grandpa's death to sit down and go through all of the pictures that were scanned and the voice recordings that we captured over Christmas, and try to compile them with grandpa's life story as he wrote it late last year. Thankfully, my mom was able to quickly edit an abbreviated version to have at the visitation and funeral, which I suspect was actually grandpa's motivation to write out his story in his own words. As the family puts together a more complete version, I hope to post it here on the blog. I wish we'd had more time to pick his brain and tease out more of the stories that I know were still up there. I wish I'd had more time with him in the past few years, and though the time we had was always quality, there's a natural guilt that comes from being thousands of miles away from your family and only seeing them once or twice a year. So I wish there had been more time. And I wish everyone I love could have met him and gotten to know this amazing guy. It's hard to be at the end of my 20's and realize that, had we done things differently, our own kids could have had the chance to know him. Hopefully we'll be something close to the kind of storyteller that he was and be able to share the legacy of Pa Harry with them and with everyone who never got the chance to meet this witty and mischievous man who taught me so much about what's important in life.

Miss you, grandpa.