Grandma's Flag - autobiographical short story

Granddad I recall mostly sitting in a straight back chair in the living room of the old, WWII era apartment he and grandma share only a short drive from the nation's capital. They were built originally to hold an influx of military personnel and their families with The Pentagon only a few miles away. Granddad never says a word to me throughout my whole childhood and sits chain smoking Camel cigarettes and drinking whiskey surreptitiously from small, metal flask. I understand that grandma is not to know of this flask and I do not ever speak of it. I learn the ways of secrecy in what must be that same unspoken manner that evidently is a family tradition.

Occasionally, when grandma's back is turned, Granddad salutes me with the flash before taking a sip, a cruel light in his eyes. It is not a friendly gesture but the closest he ever comes to communicating with me. Mostly I recall him scratching his head as he stares out at the street with long, thick, gnarly yellow fingernails terrifying me when very little, that scratching sound steady and constant, as much as the sight, then finally as a teen and young adult only disgusting me.

I am twenty five when he dies finally of lung cancer and they had lived there since before I was two when my mom would drop me off with grandma for visits lasting from a few months to a year in length as mom transitioned from one abusive alcoholic suitor to another. Soon as mom would find one who she felt might be able to provide us a home, she would come get me and try her best to make a home for us. She tried, you know. She loved me. I would try to tell her at first that it wasn't going to work but I learned that she could not listen and so remained silent waiting for the next shoe to drop and my inevitable return to grandma's apartment. It was some years later after much therapy on my own that it occurs to me that granddad had sexually molested my mom all throughout her childhood even though mom never spoke of this and my guess is that she never spoke of it to anyone at all. She just carried it with her silently in every cell of her body until the moment of her death decades later never having said a word about it so far as I know.

Now granddad is dead and his death for me is about grandma, not him. He called her “Hazel” after the TV character and treated her always as a slave and with great disrespect but now that he is dead, she is utterly and completely lost. She remains lost for the rest of her days and it is not long before she succumbs to severe Alzheimer's and my mother and I take her to a nursing home far out in the countryside where we seldom see her. When I do visit, she has no idea who I am. A few times, she seems to think I am her eldest son, Lenny. I will never forget leaving her there sitting on the bed next to her holding her hand and she is crying and I am thinking Goddammit David if you had any decency at all, you would strangle her to death right now, you coward. But I do not strangle her to death only leave her sitting on that single bed in that bare room alone, crying. It is better visiting later because she is always happy and laughing and has no idea who I am or even who she is.

But now – now granddad is dead and grandma is lost. Now mom lives with a horrible little man I think of as her last alcoholic. He is a passive man at least he does not physically abuse her or even verbally, so far as I know. Grandma moves into their two bedroom apartment for a few years afterwards until the Alzheimers gets bad. I am the first to notice it visiting having lunch with grandma watching some old movie on the TV eating on the couch on TV trays. Grandma makes a comment on the movie and I realize that she has no idea what the movie is about. I eat and watch a while and then I ask her what she thinks of the movie and she tells me and what she says while a moving story in itself bares no resemblance to the movie we have been watching. I tell my mom then to take grandma to the doctor and have them check for dementia.

That is later and now we have to attend to burying granddad, the arrangements, paying for it. We find out that since he is a WWI vet, he can get a military funeral. That helps with the costs. We have to have him taken to a cemetery that is a long drive out in the Virginia Piedmont. My mom drives grandma and I and I do not recall much about the actual funeral. I recall on the way looking out the back window of the car at horses romping through a field in the Virginia horse country: how the horses are so obviously playing and happy.

At the service itself, grandma looks more lost than ever and I wonder if in her mind she is even there at all? The seven soldiers fire their 21 gun salute and each volley makes grandma cringe and the taps rips my heart out even though I feel absolutely nothing for this man, not even hatred. Grandma watches the soldiers fold the flag in front of her as if she has no idea what they are doing but I can tell that when they hand that folded flag to her and she accepts it as if she doesn't really know why they are giving it to her that somehow it sinks in for her right there and I see that she knows what is happening, alright. The way she holds that flag breaks my heart as if she knows that she has something in her hands of great import but not exactly what? This is mostly what I recall grandma holding that flag looking utterly and completely lost at the soldier standing before her saluting her crisply.

I wonder whatever happened to that flag? I have no earthly idea.