Last month, my family lost my grandfather, Peter E. Newman, who passed away at the age of 89.
A few days after it happened, my brothers and I did a video call to check in and sort through how we were feeling. It was a complicated conversation for a few reasons—while my grandfather was a kindhearted, deeply caring man who always looked out for others (especially his family) with a great sense of humor who loved to laugh, he was also a distant, quiet, and rarely reached out to others. Often, it was hard to know what he was thinking, and we certainly didn’t know how he was feeling.
My brothers and I were closer to their grandfather than most kids. When I was eight, a few years after my grandmother died, my family moved from southern Connecticut to New Hampshire to live with my grandfather and my youngest aunt, who was still in high school at the time. The move made sense for a lot of reasons: my family wanted to get out of the city and start somewhere new, and it seemed better for my grandfather and my aunt not to be alone. My grandfather lived in an old New England house with a half-finished barn, two living rooms, two staircases, and enough space for seven people (including three little kids who needed to run around), and we lived there until I was nineteen and in college.
As a kid, it didn’t seem strange that we all lived together. I knew most families were just made up of parents and kids, rather than grandparents or aunts, but I never felt singled out because my family was different. If anything, even then I could see the benefits: my aunt and grandfather were readily available as babysitters, we could all eat together, and since my dad was a carpenter, he could do work on the house. Later, I learned there were financial benefits with sharing a house too, since my parents didn’t have to have a separate mortgage.
A lot of my memories of my grandfather from that time were just of him being there, as a member of the family. We didn’t have heart-to-heart-talks and he wasn’t intimately involved with raising us, but he was there for my band concerts and drama productions, Christmas mornings and birthdays, weekends hanging out at home, and thousands of dinners, breakfasts, and lunches. He also always wrote us birthday cards, and always wrote messages in the books he gave us as gifts.
In turn, we saw what kind of person he was and what he liked to do: the history books he read and the gardening he loved, the stuff he collected from the town transfer station (or dump, as non-northeasterners call it) where he worked after retiring, the way he paid bills by laying all of his papers out on the dining room table and then going over them one by one. He liked making bread in a square bread machine that left the hole in the bottom where the mixing stick goes, and often made egg salad for lunch, especially in the summer. And when it was his turn to babysit and make dinner, his go-to was Pillsbury crescent roll hot dogs and Kraft macaroni and cheese.
Little moments, too, really stood out. My first time eating sushi was with my grandfather—sometime in eighth or ninth grade, when the rest of my family was away for the weekend and it was just my grandfather and me, and he suggested we go out for dinner and asked me to choose a place. I boldly said I wanted to go to a Japanese restaurant and try sushi, so he took me to the old one in Concord (on Loudon Road, long closed, across from the Pizza Hut) and ordered Chinese food while I stumbled my way through a sushi sampler.
He knew I loved the Ian Fleming James Bond books and used to save them for me when people brought them into the transfer station. He also taught me how to drive stick, which I promptly forgot how to do after passing my driver’s test. And later, as a twentysomething just out of college, when I got my first job in Japan and had no money to buy the suits I had to wear as part of the dress code, my grandfather brought me down to his bedroom closet, rooted through the rack, and gave me some of his old suits to get me started.
Moments like these, I realize now, often served as a stand-in for more direct ways of sharing how he felt about us—and maybe how all of us felt about each other—instead of being able to say it directly.
Looking back, some things about that time in my life really shaped me. Like my grandfather, I also find myself drawn to helping my family and friends, doing what I can, and supporting team efforts. When we work together, everyone benefits, and we can support each other in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. It also expanded my understanding of what a family is, and how it doesn’t have to just be made up of parents and kids living together, but can take any number of forms that work best for the people in it.
It was this understanding of the world, I think, that led me to help out when I could years later, in 2023, when my grandfather’s partner passed away, he needed a place to live, and it became clear that he was really starting to experience dementia. It was an incredibly chaotic two months—and a trying time for my family—before he was able to go into a senior memory care center, but I did what I could to help, and I was in awe of those who stepped up to do even more.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the atrocities of this fucked-up world we live in, a world of unchecked greed, sanctified cruelty, lying manipulation, and people just plain being jerks to each other, both face-to-face and on a national level, where ICE agents murder people and self-serving politicians cover for them, and where heartless corporations manipulate narratives to squeeze more money from everyday people just trying to get by. In a world like this, where the stakes are high, maybe we should all be doing what we can to help each other more often.
Last night, for the first time ever, I made Pillsbury crescent roll hot dogs, served with Kraft macaroni and cheese, as a connection to that earlier time in my life when my grandfather made them so many times.
I miss you, Grandpa.
