My Ga-Ga

When I was five, my aunt had a large stuffed seal she named Holly. (I wish I could use a better verb than “have”--- like “was given” or “purchased” or “procured”--- but I was five, and so she just had it). I saw Holly and instantly wanted her in the only the way a  Kindergartner could: endlessly, hopelessly. My aunt told me I could borrow her for a week, and I treasured every moment I spent with her, her large faux fur body awkwardly pressed against my small one all night long. I cried when I had to return her.

The next time I saw my grandfather--- who will from now on be referred to as “Ga-ga”--- he told me to come sit next to him.

“I hear a noise. Why don’t you lift up that pillow?”

Underneath was a small, pure white seal. Simple. I shrieked with joy, hugged my Ga-ga, and named her Merry. (Like Merry Christmas, NOT Jesus’s mom. I was precocious.)

Merry came everywhere with me for the next four years. I wrote my first short story about her when I entered first grade. The next year, Merry travelled to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hundreds of miles away from the rest of my family, when my mom decided to uproot the three of us. I clung to her through grocery stores and five more new apartments. She was my companion when I moved back to my hometown and in with some strange man I had never seen before.

But this isn’t about Merry. And it isn’t about me. It’s about my Ga-ga.

Ga-ga’s love for me was like his gifting of Merry the Seal: extravagant, subversive, spoiled. A constant in a tumultuous childhood, a volatile adolescence, and an against-the-odds stable young adulthood. Self-less, unconditional, but at times demanding: I did, after all, take on a $60,000 mortgage after my dad died just to make him happy. (Our only fight was about that house. It lasted a day.)

Ga-ga loved his wife, his children, his grand-daughters, vanilla ice cream, DiGiorno pizza, worrying, pacing, Epcot, and cleaning his pool. He was, at times, racist and sexist. He thought I was a Rhodes Scholar because I transferred colleges after my freshman year. I never saw him read a book, but he read to me when I was a child, and he told me I could go anywhere in the world if I knew how to read. He made me realize books were my escape, and I devoured them with a ferocious hunger.

He was an imperfect man that saw the good in all people.  

Ga-ga gave me his love of Disney. He purchased a larger-than-life Astro Gladiator van with bucket seats and a VCR--- a true luxury in 1994!!!--- so I would be comfortable on our road trips to see the Mouse. (He owned that car until he died, saying he could never sell it because my tape-recorded Sailor Moon episodes were still in the backseat.) We shared my first flight on Peter Pan; breakfasts in Cinderella Castle; and adventures sliding down the tongue of a dragon. Later, we shared singing songs from Moulin Rouge under an umbrella as the rain poured down for hours; visiting my future wedding ceremony sites; and, just last year, Easter brunch. When I visited Disneyland for the first time in April, I called him as soon as we checked in so I could give him a tour of the hotel room. At times, I felt guilty for going to California instead of going to see him, but he talked about my trip excitedly for months. I wish I could have taken him with me.

 Pancreatic cancer ended his life swiftly and without care. But his life was not defined by those five painful months. While he may be a pancreatic cancer statistic, another checkpoint in its devastating numbers, he was also so much more. He was my Ga-ga.