Grandpa, Your Little Hawk Will Miss You Very Much!

I expected it with every phone call, so how did this one catch me by surprise? I don’t think my brain’s connected it yet, but I buried my grandpa on Monday. The inspiration behind the name of this blog, and I never actually told him I had a blog.

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I Miss My Grandpa

Grandpa used to call us his little hawks all our lives. He looked like a Santa, only with black hair, a black mustache, and 3D brows (read: caterpillar brows), but picture the slow vibe of his movements and his big stomach barely contained by the buttons of his shirts. His glasses on the tip of his nose.

His blue Renault Clio leaned slightly on the left side when he was driving. Quattro in summer, ćikolada in winter, and the cassettes, always the same, that he would play super loud. His chubby hands, flannel shirts (the warmest ever), always the same spot on the couch, Nat Geo Wild, and his favorite coffee cup. His cat, Miki, that he never got over.

I’ll miss all of that. I’ll miss it when Christmas comes, and I won’t open the doors to the living room to find him in his favorite spot. I’ll miss his phone calls, his voice, his trying to decipher if it is me or my mom on the phone because he can’t tell from our voices.

I’ll miss his sneaky smile that you can’t miss because his mustache betray it. I miss his laughing from his belly and keeping his face serious when all the rest of us were rolling over laughing. I miss his unintentional humor that makes me smile instead of crying now that I think of him. I miss how he pronounced certain words. I even miss his cuss words because I can’t take him seriously.

I miss watching him play cards, blaming everyone when he’s losing, and taking it way more seriously than just a game of cards. His devoted love for that weirdly shaped “star” with the red stone in the middle that he swore was his amulet and guarded possessively.

I miss him bringing me blackberries because I’m anemic, and they’ll be good for me. I miss the time we lost in Covid-19 because we had to be careful, but it took away so much of our time.

Please, Lord, Let Him Find Peace!

We found out Grandpa had cancer a year and a half ago, and these last couple of months, it got worse. We knew what to expect. It didn’t happen suddenly. I’m still confused. I feel empty, like everything was dulled by the preparations for the funeral and greeting everyone that it still didn’t get to me.

My grandpa was a complicated man, sort of enigmatic. I got to meet him first as my grandpa, then I grew up and met him as someone’s father and a husband, and then I tried to understand him as someone’s son. I think those are the dots I’ll never connect.

He was so different in all of these versions, and I’m carrying all of them in my memory. I regret that pushed me away from him for a while. That didn’t need to happen. He is my grandpa, but he was also the man I was the closest to in my childhood.

I’ll never know what worries, regrets, and doubts he carried and hid behind his warm eyes, but I hope he’s free of them now. I hope he finds peace. I hope his soul rests. I hope he knows that he was worthy and how loved he was. I just wish I could hug him, just one more time.

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I kad zadnji brod nam ode, kad nas izda samo glas

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