It’s hard to think about the concept of work without thinking about my grandpa. I would describe work as engaging in activity which is challenging and rewarding. My grandpa certainly did that. He worked repairing powerlines while getting his BA and MBA from Pepperdine, then plied his education making savvy investments in the stock market and his children’s companies. He was born on a farm in Arkansas during the Great Depression and died a millionaire living in Las Vegas and he did it by working his ass off.
It’s hard to think about the concept of working over without thinking about my grandpa. I would describe working over as excessively beating someone physically. Grandpa fathered four kids while he was working and getting his degrees. I teach college and see how hard my students who are also parents work. I had an MFA student bring her newborn to class and excuse herself periodically to nurse in the back of the room. That wasn’t my grandpa. Raising the kids was grandma’s job. Grandpa had 'real' work to do. That meant that once he was done hitting the books, that’s when he’d start hitting my dad. As a child, the number one thing I knew about grandpa was that he hit his kids. A lot. Like, it honestly took self-restraint to keep his abuse out of the opening paragraph, that’s how ingrained my sense of my grandpa as a known abuser is in my psyche. It was the stuff you bristle at in old books. Beatings with hands, fists, belts and tree branches. The story was that dad’s best friend from high school became a doctor because of all the time he spent repairing my dad’s face as a teenager. The specifics of the stories involving my aunts varied in detail but were consistent in their capacity to horrify. These were not dark family secrets, these were the subject of conversations with my father as we strolled around the mall during his Tuesday visitations after my mom divorced my dad because he was abusive. My dad claimed to have made peace with grandpa because at 17 he worked the old man over. It seemed almost magical, almost heroic of my dad to escape. And it was. My father kept us safe from grandpa in palpable, observable ways.
After my grandmother divorced him, I think grandpa tried to make up for his behavior in the ways he knew how to apply his gifts. When he visited us back east, grandpa was always doing home repairs. I helped him install ceiling fans and demolish walls at my dad’s first house in Virginia. He taught me many things I use in home repairs today at my first home. Helping him in the garage as a kid, I cut my hand and started to cry. Grandpa grabbed me and said, “You don’t cry from physical pain. You cry if your friend dies, you cry if somebody hurts your feelings, but you don’t cry from no injury.” After falling while working as a lineman, grandpa was sending out cover letters and resumes, looking for safer work. In them, grandpa described himself and his work ethic as “The Colossus of Rhodes.” While I can’t speak to the job market in the early 1980s, it’s hard to imagine employers seeking a large concrete statue of the Greek sun god Helios. Grandpa was far more impressive a worker than he was with metaphors. Those are more my thing. I’d say the trauma my grandfather inflicted certainly hangs ominously over this family like a solid, inanimate structure, casting a long, dark shadow.
It’s hard to think of the concept of working through without thinking about my grandpa. I would describe working through as the process of clarifying and amplifying your own personal interpretations of reality, past and present (but mostly past). Grandpa certainly amplified his own version of reality, which is probably the biggest thing we have in common. We’re both happy to share our opinion, even if it makes us look like an asshole. Grandpa is the only family member on that side to ever mention my albinism, when he remarked of my daughter, “I sure am glad the albinism gene didn’t show up.” It was kind of dickish, but I appreciated that he even said anything. Most people on that side of the family shy away from uncomfortable conversations by pretending everything is fine.
But I think there’s value in honestly and openly working through my experience of this man. It’s been challenging and rewarding to try to reconcile my feelings surrounding the death of an abusive person I happened to love very much because he was always pretty nice to me, even if he scared the crap out of me. I try to honor my grandpa by giving my best in my own work. I’m a workaholic, in that I try to mostly engage in activities which I find challenging and rewarding. That includes my career, but also hobbies and constructively participating in my family. Marriage is a rewarding challenge. I find raising my daughter to be the single most challenging and rewarding activity I have ever pursued. All this hits different now that I have kids and see how fragile they are. I cannot fathom intentionally harming my children. It hurts my feelings that nobody did the work of protecting my dad and aunts when they were kids, so even by grandpa’s rules, it’s okay to cry about it.
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