My brother teaching Red about "the shocker."

I'm in New York right now, where I came to watch my grandfather die. Dying, I have quickly learned, is not funny. And although I recognize that, I'm going to try to focus on only the amusing parts of this saga, because the other parts make me cry.

One of the only positive things about this situation has been how my family has managed to come together and use our terrible sense of humor to cope with an actual problem, rather than to just gather like buzzards circling for the weakest member of the group to mock mercilessly. This time, we used our brutal sarcasm to build a wall against the feelings that were threatening to, well, make us feel. And when humor fails us, we can always fall back on the liquid morphine that the hospice left behind.

The hospice, in addition to sending large amounts of narcotics, sent a social worker to help us cope with the situation. Little did she know what she was getting into. Red (he was a redhead, thus earning him this nickname) had cancer and was in terrible, terrible pain. We all knew that the end was near, but we worried that he would linger on, in misery. My uncle asked the social worker what we should do if this went on for a long time. She was quiet for a minute and then said something like, "To be honest, I think it will only be a few days before he passes."

My uncle turned to her wide-eyed, and said with complete (feigned) sincerity, "You mean, he's going to die??" The social worker was flabbergasted. My mother suggested to my uncle that he not make jokes with the social worker, whereupon I cautioned him that it might land him in foster care (he's over 40). At that point, everyone in my family begin jousting to see who of us might be allowed into foster care, hospice care or just into the bottle of liquid morphine. A ripping good time, if only for the look of horror on the social worker's face.

On Wednesday at 2 am my grandfather died, which due to his condition was a relief to all of us, and to him I am sure. Within 5 minutes of his passing my grandmother commented on the corpulence of my upper arms when I hugged her, and I realized that although Red might not be around, my family life would go on.

I miss him, but I am glad that I have spent so much time with him recently. I had some wonderful times with him this summer--the picture above is from August at our family reunion. That night, when he was outside the restaurant with my brother and me, he told us that he was worried about getting grief for not wearing his hearing aid that night. "I'm thinking about stuffing breadcrumbs in my ears instead," he told us. "No one will notice the difference."

My grandfather was totally rad and I'm sorry that he's gone. But it's nice to know how many people there are in the world that loved him.