The hardest lesson.

The idea for this piece was to write about someone that taught you something. Luckily for me, I have had many wonderful teachers in my life. The one I think of most often, didn’t think he was a teacher. He was my step-grandfather. My brother and I were no blood relation to him, but you would never have known it. I won’t go into how we came to live with him and my grandmother, that’s a different story.
He taught me many things. The man seemed to be able do anything with his hands. Many of the things he taught me were not intentional. He was kind and caring, whether it was animals or people. A farmer, he wasn’t well versed in the ways of the world, he had little formal schooling. He taught me a love of the earth. How to help it share it’s bounty. He taught me that if you take care of things, they will take care of you. His many lessons, intentional or otherwise, are too numerous to list.
The most important thing that he ever taught me I’m sure he would rather he didn’t. He taught me how to say goodbye. In his last years, his health began to decline rapidly. The once robust man got very thin. His weathered skin became very pale. He loved being outdoors, working with the soil, I had never seen him pale. Even with his failing health, he would use a metal chair like a walker to get into his now much smaller garden. He would sit on the chair and tend to his plants. Everyone but me tried to get him to stop doing it. I knew better. This made him happy. He would tend to his plants, talking to them like old friends. Whether he was talking to them or to God, would be hard to say. If he knew you were there, he wouldn’t speak like that. In the solitude of his garden, he was at his happiest. The family dog laying by his side, he would tend to the plants, at one with his idea of heaven.
In his last days, in the hospital, he could no longer speak. I spent the last few hours with him, telling him how much he had taught me, how much I had loved him. This was not something manly men said in his world, I could not let him leave me without speaking the words out loud. Whether he understood or not, I will never know. He departed this world peacefully, having touched many lives. He probably never knew how much he meant to everyone that was around him. Things like that, were not spoken of, not between men. In the end, the hardest lesson he taught me was that sometimes, even the teacher is wrong. Some things must not go unspoken.
To this day, some thirty years later, I think of him daily. Every skill I have, I can trace back to his early teachings. Hopefully, I never again will have use for his hardest lesson. I have learned to let people know how I feel before it’s too late. May I never again have to say goodbye to one loved so dearly.