“You’re good at what you do,” he told me one day after I described a particularly complex task to him. “You solve problems. You make things work. It’s a gift, Declan. Not everyone can do that.”
“It’s just electrical work, Grandpa. It’s not exactly saving lives.”
“No. What happens when there’s a power outage in a hospital? What happens when the lights go out in a house where a child is afraid of the dark? What happens when a family’s heating breaks down in January?”
He shook his head.
“Declan, you make the world go round. Never let anyone tell you it doesn’t matter.”
I have often thought back to that conversation, especially when my father made remarks about my career, about how I could have done something more impressive, more prestigious, more worthy of the Mercer name.
Grandpa Chester never made me feel inadequate. He made me feel like I was exactly who I was meant to be.
“Why do you always go there?” my father asked me one day at a family dinner to which Grandpa Chester wasn’t invited. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“Life,” I said. “Work. Theo. Anything that comes to mind.”
“What could he possibly have to say about life? He worked in a factory for forty years. He never went anywhere, never did anything, never accomplished anything worth telling.”
“That’s not true.”
“Name me one thing he accomplished, one thing that matters.”
I couldn’t answer him, not the way he would have wanted. I couldn’t show him diplomas, promotions, houses, or cars. I could only show him a life lived simply, honestly, with grace, humor, and love. And I knew my father wouldn’t understand. So I stopped trying to explain. I kept visiting him. Every Sunday, rain or shine, for twelve years.
My grandmother Rose died when I was twenty-five. My grandfather Chester was devastated. They had been married for fifty-six years, and he told me one day that he had never spent a single night away from her during all that time.
“She was everything to me,” he said, sitting on the porch the Sunday after her funeral. The rest of the family had gone home hours before. I was the only one who stayed. “I don’t know how I’ll be able to live without her, Declan.”
“You’ll find the solution, Grandpa. One day at a time. That’s what she always said.”
He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief that had seen better days.
“One day at a time. She has always been the strongest.”
I held his hand while he cried. I was twenty-five years old and had never seen my grandfather cry before. It broke my heart and, at the same time, soothed another part of me.
After Rose died, my visits became more important. Grandfather Chester was left alone, wandering around his little house, with no one to talk to except me. My father came once or twice during the nine years between Rose’s death and Chester’s. Preston never came. Bridget stopped by once, complained about the smell, and never returned. But I came every Sunday. And during those nine years, I learned more about my grandfather than I ever had before.
I learned that he and Rose had won a lawsuit against the steel mill in 1971 after an accident that nearly cost him a leg. They were awarded $15,000 in damages, a fortune at the time, and everyone expected them to spend that money: buy a bigger house, a new car, go on vacation.
They didn’t spend it.
“They thought we were crazy,” Grandpa Chester told me one day, about three years before his death, “for putting that money in the bank instead of enjoying it. But Rose and I discussed it at length. We decided that we preferred security to material possessions. We preferred knowing that the money was there, that it was growing, that it was waiting for us, rather than having a nice car that would rust in ten years.”
“So you left it there all these years?”
“We added funds gradually. A little here, a little there. Rose was good with money. She had a knack for numbers. She figured out how to make it grow.”
“How many are in there now, Grandpa?”
He smiled, that mysterious smile he always wore when he was keeping a secret.
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