Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

Bloomberg business channel plays on the television. A businessman till the end.

I feel like I should try to entertain him. That’s my job. So I tell him stories about my sons and my work. I tell him about my Esquire interview with George H. W. Bush, during which the former president said, off the record, that a certain politician’s wife had a “pickle up her ass.” I tell him in a loud and upbeat voice, because Jane says he responds better that way.

He doesn’t laugh, but he nods slowly, and his big eyebrows twitch a bit.

The hospital gown doesn’t cover his legs, which are red and yellow, veiny and sausagy. I hate those gowns.

My sister, Beryl, knocks on the door and comes into room 134. Her face goes a little white when she sees his body, which seems so shrunken. “Hi, Grandpa,” she says, shakily. “How are you doing?” She then excuses herself to go to the bathroom. A couple of minutes later, she comes back red-eyed.

“The foliage is beautiful nowadays,” says Jane. “We have to get you out of here so you can enjoy it.”

Grandpa doesn’t say anything. Just keeps breathing loudly. Is he really going to get out of here? It’s that crucial balance between delusional optimism and realism.

I get out my laptop and show him some videos of our family, including one of Beryl’s daughter playing a mouse in a musical based on The Wind in the Willows. She looks so purposeful in her red hat and red coat, gazing off into the horizon as she sings.

A doctor comes in to inspect the rash on his arm where the IV enters.

Another knock on the door, this time his longtime secretary, Valerie. “Hi, Chief!” she says. Her friend is with her, and wonders if she could say a prayer. She clasps his hand and asks God to help heal this man. Does my grandfather understand what is going on? What does he, as a lifelong agnostic, think of the prayer?

As I leave, I tell my grandfather, my voice as chipper as I can manage, “I love you, Grandpa. I’ll see you soon!” He tries to say something, but it just comes out as a moan.

He died two days later. There was some sort of delay at the hospital, so my late grandfather’s body lay there for six hours on the bed. A strange fate for a man who was always on the move.

Marti told me, “He looked so calm and peaceful lying there, it was hard to remember that he wasn’t just taking a nap.”

We held the funeral for my grandfather at a Westchester cemetery on a sunny and brisk day. There were only fifteen of us gathered around the grave, just the immediate family. A public memorial would be held later.

A little black amplifier rested on top of the pink headstone. One by one, we came up, picked up the mike, and said our goodbyes as the wind rustled the red leaves on the tree behind us.

We talked about his civil rights work. About his love of family, justice, apple cider, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. About his trips to Ghana for its liberation and the time LBJ grabbed him by the lapels for a photo op.

Marti read a letter he wrote that showed he was a sucker for silly word games: “This letter is being written without a salutation, since you know who you are and it is silly therefore to tell you who you are. And to call you dear when everybody knows you are very cheap.”

After the speeches, four cemetery workers lowered the coffin into the ground with thick straps. Most of the family walked to the nearby grave of my late aunt to pay respects. But a couple of us stayed behind, including me and my cousin Rachel, a psychology student from Baltimore.

We picked up the two shovels stuck handle up in the pecan-colored dirt. We didn’t talk. Rachel began by tossing a shovelful of dirt onto the coffin. It landed with a soft thud.

I bent my knees and tossed in a shovelful, as well. It thudded, and the dirt skittered across the coffin.

We needed something useful to do. We needed to have a purpose, even if that purpose was pointless since the workers would do it if we didn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Grandpa would have appreciated it. One last show of affection from his grandchildren. It felt like tucking someone into bed for the final time.

We worked silently as the dirt made a collection of mounds on the coffin. I was bending deep at the knees, putting my back into it. Every shovelful a heaping one. This work was physical, and physical felt good right now. I was starting to sweat under my suit. Grandpa was not a man who did things half-assed. Neither would I.

The next day, The New York Times ran an obituary of my grandfather. It was the obituary he would have wanted. It called him a “peacemaker,” which is a pretty great noun. It talked about his passion for resolving conflicts, quoting an old New York Times Magazine article that said, “Some men look at Gina Lollobrigida and are set aflame. Kheel gets the same reaction by exposure to a really tough strike situation.”

And it made him sound like James Bond. “Even though Mr. Kheel handled disputes for bakers, garbage collectors, plumbers, subway conductors, tugboat captains and undertakers, he was an unabashed bon vivant, fond of fast sports cars and fine food.”

The photo showed him holding two phones, one pressed to each ear, in the middle of a negotiation between labor and bosses—maybe the bus drivers’ union, maybe the symphonies’. It didn’t say, and it didn’t matter.

Julie clipped the obituary and pasted it onto a piece of cardboard, which I thought was a lovely, nostalgic gesture in these digital times.

There was a short video on the Times website. They must have interviewed him just a couple of years ago, and he must have known