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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us February 23, 2005 Tales From The Crib Grandpa Joe Jennifer Margulis The last time we saw Grandpa Joe he was lying in his recliner in the living room in his 1950s style house in Buffalo, N.Y. Ninety-two years old, he was becoming more infantile every day. He had lost so much weight that he looked strangely young again, his face soft like a baby's. When I held his hand I was surprised by how velvety his skin felt, smooth like my children's but without the rolls of baby fat underneath. Joe couldn't swallow regular food anymore - his throat would catch and he would gag. So he ate soup and jarred baby pur�e. And he sucked on Lifesavers. There was a plate full of them on a dish beside his recliner. "Can I have one?" My 4-year-old asked eagerly. Suddenly the moribund man was gone and the old Joe was back. He bolted upright and cried, "Oh no!" shaking his head vigorously. "Jimmy, no!" He grabbed my husband by the collar with surprising force, "I couldn't take that kind of responsibility." Then he sank back, still holding my husband around the neck. With James' head close to his, Grandpa Joe spoke in a gruff whisper: "Take some for her for later - go on! - that's not enough. Take more. Take a yellow one too." My daughter was so bewildered she forgot to make a great big whiney show of protest. Grandpa Joe was afraid of choking. Even as a young man, anxiety ran high in Joe's household, the fear of dying like an unrelenting stalker. This fear developed in the wake of the untimely deaths first of Joe's wife and then his eldest daughter. His wife went to the beauty parlor one morning for a manicure and died there, leaving Joe with four young children to raise. His daughter, 33 years old and the mother of five, went out to eat with her husband. He left to call the babysitter and when he came back she was dead. These were the days before the Heimlich Maneuver - she choked to death on a piece of sirloin. Everyone in the family, including my husband, has inherited Grandpa Joe's wide-ranging and sometimes illogical fears. These fears - of choking, illness, sudden death - have become the worn and ugly baggage we are trying not to carry down to the next generation. Grandpa Joe died two months later. James gave the girls and me extra long goodbye hugs at the airport. As with every parting, he was afraid he would never see us again. He gave the eulogy for his grandfather and talked about how Joe lived on in him, and what it meant to be a father: "I wish I could imprint my love and my presence on my daughters so firmly that their time spent with me would always be with them," James said. "What will stay with them is part of their being so essential to who they are that they don't even know it's from me, or from being with me, because it's all them. But it makes me live on in them, with them every day, more so than my very genes that they carry. I'll be there to share their joy as they feel it, to savor the world, and to love, as I loved them." When we left Grandpa Joe's house in Buffalo and were in the car, my 4-year-old happily sucked her round candies. "I love Grandpa Joe," she sighed, swinging her little legs as she crunched the sweets between her teeth. "And I love Lifesavers." Jennifer Margulis is the award-winning editor and co-author of "Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love." DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Online Pharmacy Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams