With my Grandfather gone and the rest of the summer of 1978 ahead of us, there were still some things that had to be done that impacted my family life.
I don't know if there was any official will, but one of the things my family got was my great-grandfather's blacksmithing equipment. It was an anvil, a sledge hammer and a hand-cranked blower. Of these three items, only the anvil remains in my father's possession.
There were a number of other items of value that belonged to him. My grandfather could play the fiddle. I never saw that again. My grandfather had won two belt buckles competing in the rodeos at Madison Square Garden. I never saw those buckles, but I know they existed. They wound up going to my Dad's sisters.
Another thing that I know was in my grandfather's possession was the Ogolon family tree. Yes, it was an actual fully-researched geneological timeline that went back several generations. I only ever saw it once, and I got rather angry about it at the time. The tree had apparently last been updated in 1963, the year before I was born. The tree listed my father and showed he had married my mother. It also showed that Aunt Pand had three children up to that point: Wend, Sted and Grid. But it stopped after that. When I saw this, I felt like I wasn't a part of the family. I immediately said, "Hey! Loyd and I aren't on here! Somebody get a pen and a ruler and let's make a few additions!" Dad said I couldn't do that. We had to get someone official to do it or something like that. The tree hadn't been updated in more than a decade at that point. Why did we have to wait to have a specific person to do it? At any rate, I never saw that family tree again. I have no idea where it's at.
An odd thing of Granddad's turned up a few years later. Every morning that I spent at the ranch, I saw him drink coffee out of this jade mug. I didn't realize it at the time, but I actually had grown to associate him with that mug. About five years ago, I was staying with Loyd in Santa Fe. Among his dishes, I saw this jade mug. I immediately wondered if it was Granddad's. Without me saying anything about it, Loyd said it was Granddad's. I guess he had gotten it after Grandma had been sent to the nursing home.
The biggest thing after Granddad's funeral was helping Grandma deal with not having her husband around anymore. My father and his two sisters decided that what they could do was have us grandchildren each come up and spend alternating weeks with Grandma. One week, Loyd and I went. The next week it was Pand's children and then Berd's children. Then we continued the cycle again.
The first night Loyd and I went to Grandma's, we went to bed in the guest room. This was the first time for us to be spending the night since Granddad died. In the dark, I could hear Loyd crying and he cried for a long time. I felt really bad, because I felt like I should be crying, too. However, no tears came. That made me question whether I actually loved my grandfather. I never heard Loyd cry himself to sleep again that week.
Our days were spent doing chores around the ranch. We collected eggs out of the barn in the morning. We did some raking in the garden and some general cleaning up. We then spent the rest of the day running around the ranch.
This was also the routine for our cousins. Everybody thought they were doing their part to help Grandma through this tough time. More than 30 years later however, I found out we weren't considered that helpful. When I went to see my grandmother in the nursing home for what would be the last time, I took a video camera and recorded our conversation. Grandma was suffering from dementia and didn't really recognize anyone, not even her own children. I got lucky because when I went to see her and told her my name was Fayd, she said, "Fayd... Fayd Ogolon! How are you?" A big smile came across her face and I could tell that she knew who I was. Unfortunately, that only lasted a few seconds as she quickly forgot who she was talking to and didn't smile again. (Loyd had seen her several times. He said he never even got that much recognition out of her.)
She continued talking about things that had happened in her past. One of the things that she mentioned was that after Granddad died, the grandchildren came up to visit her every week. However, since we were kids, we weren't able to do a lot of the heavy work needed to run the ranch. She needed the grown children to come and help her out, not us grandchildren. She felt like her children had abandoned her at that point.
But just because someone close to you dies, they never completely leave you. They just leave you a little less complete.
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