Distillation

The sun gleamed on the smooth snow.  My daughter raised a ski pole at me and bravely angled her skis down slope.  Slowly she pushes off, angling across the run one way, then back the other way.  That's my girl, I think to myself.

Nana is at the bottom of the run capturing the moment with her camera.  Ava angled sharply toward her and toppled a couple of feet away, distracted by the audience.  Papa chuckled next to me as I likened Nana's camera to a magnet pulling Ava straight for it. 

The wind bursted suddenly through the aspens and pines.  Stole my breath with it's iciness.  Even the sun couldn't warm my skin in the gale.  I breathed in and out.  In and out.  I looked at my father-in-law, my babies' papa.  He breathed in and out, his skin somewhat ashen.  I listened for some clue, some hitch in his breathing that would give away the devouring sickness within.  He is dying.

It's been two years since we received a text message from my mother-in-law with the diagnosis.  Lung cancer.  Inoperable.  My husband crumpled into his pillow next to me.  He quietly sobbed as he said, "I knew it.  I knew it." 

David is not my father.  But I love him.  I can't help but think at moments like these that it could be the last time he watches his granddaughters accomplish something.  Will they remember how much joy they brought him?  How much he loved cradling them as infants, turning a hard stoic exterior into a mushy baby-talking grandpa? 

Watching the men in my life has shown me one thing - the fathers we might have known - strict, stressful or too busy - all of that is scoured away with grandfatherhood.  They are no match for the generation that came after their own children.  Easily manipulated and a willful partner in crime they become a grown man child with thinning salt and pepper hair. 

Ice cream? Sure.  Wear your pink feather boa? Absolutely.  Bedtime?  Who cares, we'll let your parents worry about that when they get home at midnight. 

How do you wrap up a person - a complicated being - and store them away as a memory?  How do you document the love of father, a grandfather and accurately portray the way their eyes crinkled when you walked on chubby legs for the first time, or when their hand encircled your smaller one in theirs on a Sunday walk?  How do you distill the essence of a person after they are gone? 

For now Ava clips out of her bindings and steps into Papa's waiting embrace as he fusses over her.  She smiles up into his face, and he smiles back.