I remember the last time Grandpa came out of the house. There are a lot of things in life that slip away from you I think; hell, you ask me what I did yesterday even and nine times out of ten I wouldn't be able to tell you. Same reason I'm still single, I bet. My normal talks, the how-you-dos, the laughs and sarcasm? Every one of them is a privilege to me. They're forgettable, sure, but they leave me with a warmth inside that's hard to put out. The problem is when I deal with the life-changing arguments and debates. Those should stick in me, should tell me to straighten up, fly right, but I never do. I forget them, I forget them, break a promise and then I get called the bad guy in the relationship and deep down I know that's true.

But one thing I do remember. I remember the last time Grandpa came out of the house.

The news once they wrestled it out of the family doctor hit Grandma hard, Dad harder. It's the type of thing you ask a second opinion for, then, when that doc, when he gives the same conclusion, you start searching for a third. Guess it lines up with the stages of grief just nicely. Denial. What a great tool, am I right? Denial, ignore it until it goes away. Might work for an annoying younger sister for an hour or two so you can get back to racing matchbox cars, maybe, but not for something like this. Not that it stopped us in any way—or at least me out of everyone in the family. It's been a long time, years and years in my past, but even then, sometimes I think I'll see him out of the corner of my eye, laughing at the table, gardening outside, telling me everything will be alright.

Denial. Great, great tool, to hell with the other stages.

August the Second, just before lunch. That was the last time he came out of the house. He was wearing long johns. Grey long johns. When I was younger I thought they were sweatpants. I asked Grandma why he wore sweatpants to bed all the time and she laughed hard, probably harder than I think she ever had before. Maybe harder than she ever laughed after too—I remember saying it wasn't that funny. Instead of replying, she just patted me on the head, gave me an oatmeal cookie and sent me out to play with my older cousins on a game of baseball—I hated running, but I loved to bat and, since I was a decent switch hitter, it was a sport I did not to shabby in, even got on the team at school. Not that that lasted once the news about Grandpa got to us.

Grandpa came out of the house and was sitting in his long johns and tee-shirt, staring.

I always admired the starers, they're the people that really can get things done. The starers and the dreamers, man. You don't want to work with the person that says specifically that he's an ideas guy, but you want to work with the starers. You want the guy that can go out to a bench and look at the world, notice the subtle change of light to dark, the coloration of the grass below his well-worn shoes, the birds roosting on electric wires as if they can't notice the thrum that plays throughout the electric rivers above.

Grandpa sat there on that August day staring out across the porch. At first I thought he was watching the dogs, his dogs, our dogs—one mutt so grease-stained and oily and proud of being grease-stained and oily that we had given up on giving him a bath proper years ago and just called him 'Matty' because of his matted down hair, the dog other a purebred basset hound we called 'Droopy' because his ears were so pitch-black they reminded us of that one cartoon dog—but that's not what he was watching. Or at least not all of it.

Dad told me that soldiers back in the war, if they had seen a lot of shit, would have something called a thousand yard stare. It's the kind of despondent, distant look a lot of people get when shit really goes down. Your mind and body both are having a hard time working so they take a break, leaving you blank or, from what dad said, thinking so hard of home that it feels there. That you can just take a few steps, just a few steps forward and you'll be at your house that you left behind, just a simple knock and you'll be greeted by your wife and everything will turn back to normal.

That ends eventually, at least for the ones that don't break, and it isn't a gentle ease back into reality, no sir, not the way Dad said it. It's electroshock therapy, a jolt through your body, sudden and violently throwing you back into the fray.

Grandpa seemed to hold that same sort of vacant stare when I first caught glimpse of him, but, after a moment's consideration, there was more to it than that.

His eyes sucked in detail, swallowed it like illumination swallowing darkness with the flick of a light switch. He absorbed it, the trees in the distance, the dogs, the flowers still kicking despite August being fairly chill that year. Grandpa sat in his chair, picking at a splinter the wooden armrest held with a finger that was rapidly losing strength. He soaked in the single bird resting on the milk barn, he soaked in The Pit, as I called it, a deep concrete pool at the end of the cattle lot where we stored manure into and every spring would pump it out and fertilize the alfalfa we had in the far fields. I always had a fear of falling into The Pit, of drowning in that earthy smelling rank thing. We once found a cat that did just that. Drowning in a sea of shit. I can think of worse ways to go, but, honestly, not many unless you're actively trying to fuck your shit up on a daily basis.

Grandpa soaked in every nook and cranny of his slice of the world, every fence line, every animal, every tool, every shrub—I was ashamed to admit I forgot to trim before he stepped out—every good, every bad, he memorized it all, drew it deep and hard into his soul. Thinking on it. Digesting it like you would a meal at an expensive restaurant; mulling it over and savoring the texture and flavor of the piece, instead of wolfing it down like it was just a ham sandwich. Finally done with that, Grandpa then looked up and leaned back into his chair to take in the blue sky above him.

I wonder what he was thinking when he looked up at the sky for that last time. One of my biggest regrets, maybe my only regret—the deep seated, painful sort, mind, not the kind of regret when you overeat, or stay out too late, but real regret, the kind that actively can change a man from what he was to who he's going to be—my only regret when it came my childhood was that I never asked him about it. What 'it' was, I don't know, but I feel like that there was a puzzle that he was waiting for me to solve during that quiet respite after we talked options with the doctors, but before the heavier treatments. I never had the courage to break what seemed to be a cathartic meditation for him, I didn't have it in me to disrupt the righteous, noble king sitting alone as he viewed the peasants below from his throne. I simply watched as he watched the place he grew up in and built with his two bare hands and he took stock of his little word.

The result was obvious, the actions expected on what happened, the days after he went outside. While the cancer ate away at him, the chemo did its damnedest to beat the disease to the punch, atrophying his body, atrophying his mind to where he became confused, punch-drunk on a daily basis. He was a better man than I became; he could see the writing on the wall. Grandpa got past denial and seemed to jump to acceptance remarkably quick. When I was there, my denial got shaken when I heard him throwing up in the bathroom. Another thing I remember, one not quite as borderline mystical as when he went outside for the last time, or perhaps mystical in its own right in the same fashion as nightmares and creeping terrors are as a child, the sort of mystic situation that takes your breath away and leaves you panting until your knees buckle under your weight and you only feel better when someone tells you it'll be alright. In that sense, maybe it's mystical. His sickness I could smell and it smelled like death. It smelled like a grave. It's something hard to describe to someone who has never dealt with the slow, languishing death of someone else, someone near to them, but there's a certain smell to people when they're on their last legs. People can smell it just as much as animals can at times, I think. And after I saw grandpa on the porch for that last time, he practically sweated it every waking moment of his life.

Eventually, his body deteriorated enough that he was bed ridden. We'd spend hours sitting in the living room with him, a bed smack dab in the center of the room so he could watch TV—Happy days, the title of it making me almost laugh every time it came on, then feeling like shit because I thought the juxtaposition was hilarious, but sometimes if you can't laugh you might scream and if you scream it's hard to say when you'll ever stop— he'd watch that and talk with us, with me especially after I got out of school. I had a hard time talking with him then and I wish I didn't have an issue looking at him during that time, but I did. I think he was ashamed at his own weakness, but I didn't know what to say to him to make him feel better, make any of it feel better. I didn't have anything I could have said during that all.

Could I?

Denial is the name, denial is the game. You just don't acknowledge what's coming, you don't acknowledge your mistakes: you act like a ostrich with its head underground and maybe what you're dreading inside you, what you can feel coming creeping behind you and touching your back won't happen.

And speaking of birds, I felt like we were a murder of crows the night he passed on. All of us were together, watching, waiting as he took his breaths, struggled to hold on for a few more fleeting minutes. Eventually, like everyone does, he went into that good night and breathed nevermore.

The end came as sure as a shutting of a book; the funeral happened and, not more than a month later, grandma moved. She needed some place more 'economically sound' for her.

I think that was bullshit. I think she just had to get away. If a person is at a place long enough, that place becomes the person for people that knew him. She probably could catch his cologne every now and again, would see certain angles and times of the day and be painfully reminded of him. I know I sure was, and am.

Now, with years under my belt, a lot of my own inner-resentment is gone, dried up like the pond that used to be at his place. But even though I've gotten over it, mostly, there's always one clear thought to me, one strong ache of regret out of every single action and thought I had about him and the illness.
I saw him on the porch on that day in August. I saw him come out of the house. And I didn't talk to him.