MY GRANDFATHER'S BELT

“To photograph the belt, I used a large depth of field. Getting all the details in focus reminded me of the clarity with which my grandfather lived.”

My grandfather’s first name, which he disliked, was Ernest. He was earnest, and opinionated, and unusually decisive. He loved to laugh, but he never tried to be funny. He was a lawyer and always made his case with his hands flat on the table before him.

When my grandmother’s dementia became too much to manage, my grandfather moved the two of them to a continuing-care community called Homewood. She went to the memory-care section; he, to an independent-living cottage. On his visits to her each day, he called her “Bright Eyes” and fed her his homemade applesauce. For tips on how to live on his own, he reached out to his two daughters, learning how to thread a needle from a diagram my aunt drew on an index card. He got on well and called Homewood’s front desk every morning to say, “I’m alive!”

After my grandmother died, in 2000, I thought the right thing for me, the eldest grandchild, to do was call and spend time with my grandfather, even though he disapproved of how much I moved my hands when I talked and generally wasn’t the easiest person for a wishy-washy young adult like me to be around. Like him, I’ve always been earnest, but I’ve never been decisive. In 2000, I was just a year out of graduate school with a master’s degree I’d started in 1991.

Early in my efforts to reach out, I asked him about his life—and got a dismissive “What do you want to know about that for?” in response. Still, he mailed me a copy of his multi-page handwritten outline for the “About my Life” talk he gave to the Homewood men’s club. Several times I drove eight hours to visit him at Homewood, where I met his pals and got to see him—in my grandmother’s apron—doing his dishes, ironing and poking at his microwave to cook breakfast. In 2003, we even went on a Canada cruise, happily slurping piña coladas on the ship. (“It’s not a boat!” he reminded me, stabbing the air to make his point.)

When he moved to assisted living, his dark hair became downy and gray. In a chair with a tray table, he practiced playing harmonica; his hands had become too arthritic for piano or his violin. “I’m dilapidated!” he told me when I visited at Christmas in 2006; a few months later he was receiving hospice care. One day an aide asked why he was smiling so much. “Because I’m ready to go!” And he was. The last time we spoke on the phone, shortly before he died, he had a hard time hearing me and kept saying, “What?” As we said goodbye, his tenor voice wavered. He sounded as uncertain as I so often felt.

After the memorial service, a Homewood administrator walked interested family members to a storage unit and invited us to take what we wanted from a box of my grandfather’s personal belongings—the things he had with him during his hospice care. I reached for the neatly curled belt. For years, it had delineated my grandfather, separating his pressed pants from the pressed shirt where he kept his reading glasses tucked in a breast pocket. 

To photograph the belt for this story, I used a large depth of field. Getting all the details in focus reminded me of the clarity with which my grandfather lived, and the no-fuss way he made adjustments when adjustments had to be made. “Just make a decision!” was his motto. With my selection of this sturdy, practical treasure, I suppose that’s exactly what I did.

—Mary Beth Abel 

I was nearly the youngest person on our cruise, second only to an actual baby. My grandfather was 93!

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Mary Beth Abel lives in Seattle with her husband and their young son. Formerly a writer of science educational materials for middle schoolers, she’s now a freelance editor and is working on a novel and essays.

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