Great-grandpa

I'd become convinced before that night that whatever ills had befallen, I was vastly more capable of crying than I'd ever been, tears for no apparent reason. Check that--not "for no apparent reason," but for reasons that seemed unlike any ordinary reason for tears. Just did more of it. I didn't think I was depressed about being crippled, nor was my condition such that I absolutely couldn't determine what kind of future I--and we--would have. What I recognized about myself was that I just shed tears more easily than I had before the stenosis (and what the heck is "stenosis" anyway?). 

Maybe there was a cause/effect thing going on here, I thought--the stenosis somehow made me shed tears, froze something in my heart just as it had frozen something in my legs and in my balance and made me look soused when I walked, which I couldn't really do at all without a walker.

I cried a lot--not about my condition, not because I'd won a badge that hung from the rearview, not because just getting in an out of our Subaru was a dangerous challenge, an event I hadn't yet accomplished without sinking like a baby in a high-chair.

Not only that, the phone call I'd just taken didn't pass along news that was at all surprising. I knew our granddaughter was about to have her baby, our first great-grandchild, knew that baby was going to be a little girl, and knew the pregnancy had gone extremely well. I was no more surprised about her birth than I was concerned. Everything went great, my wife told me when she called.

"And what was the name again?" I asked. My wife wasn't altogether sure herself--"It was 'heaven' spelled backwards," she said, "and I don't know how to say it exactly." That would take a while. But that's the headline that night: "You're a great-grandpa!!!" 

So I cried. Wasn't scared a bit, wasn't worried. I was 76 years old, but I couldn't remember the last time I actually wiped tears away tears of joy, and that's what they were--tears of joy. 

And lo, it was good. It was very good. Dang right. I'd been at Heartland Manor for three days. I needed 'em maybe--tears of joy. 

Heartland was my third hospital in about a month--two stints just up the road, a week an hour away in the city, and now Heartland Manor, when the hospital staff determined that my condition would require more than the kind and level of care I could get closer to home. I'd just then become a resident of a home that was that for people--some younger, some older--who mostly had conditions I couldn't help thinking had gone farther south than mine.

Anyway, there I lay in my little hospital bed, wiping away tears of joy, when a nurse came in. Dissembling wasn't an option--my eyes were smeary and I was sniffing. 

"What's the deal, Jim?" she said and stood right over me, blessedly, as nurses do.

I told her, and just like that something in me squeezed another half-dozen out. Voice warbled, nose ran--I was a mess. Tears of joy.

Here's the story: she cried too, which only guaranteed that this blessed spell I was in was going to keep leaking waterworks.

Another nurse just happened by. "Tell her, Jim," nurse #1 said, both of us squeezing Kleenex. "Girl or boy?" she said. 

"Girl," I said.

"And what's her name?" she said, reaching for the box.

"I don't know," I said. I didn't. "H-e-a-v-e-n spelled backwards or something."

That's when Nurse #3 dropped by, having noted all the commotion. Just like that a quartet of blubbering sobbers started singing, all of it, all of that wet stuff sprung from sheer joy. 

This fourth bawler had heard the name before. She pulled a pen from her garb, grabbed some paper from somewhere, and spelled it out in big blocks: "N--E--V--A--E--H," she wrote because she didn't want Great-grandpa to be a fool should the new mom call. She hung the baby's name up above the tv.

I stayed at Heartland Manor for two and one-half months. Still can't believe it. And I told my wife when finally I could get in and out of the car without spilling all over the driveway, that it wasn't good for my marriage to be there that long because I fell in love at least a dozen times.

It's true. Let me tell you about the night my wife called to tell me about the baby--our great granddaughter, the first. 

Don't mind my sniveling.