In memoriam

Saturday, my grandfather passed away due to complications from pneumonia and stage four cancer. He was born Billy Gene Matthews in 1933 but, due to a clerical error on his birth certificate, we knew him as Billie Jean Matthis. My grandfather wasn't what you could call a great man. No one would ever talk about his father but we know that he was a cruel human being and who knows what unspeakable horrors his children lived through. My grandfather was a tortured man who never was able to face his past. He was stationed in Japan with the air force and was medically discharged before meeting my grandmother and marrying her on June 28th, 1958. They met at the USO and shared a mutual love of dancing. Together, they had six children: Chris, Debbie (my mother), Jeff, Craig, Dawn, and Jodi. They have seventeen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. I had a complicated relationship with my grandfather as a child, due to his struggles with alcoholism, bigotry, and verbal abuse but I also learned a great deal from him. After having a massive stroke fifteen years ago and losing a great deal of his previous self, many of us were finally able to have a relationship with a kind and loving man and to catch a glimpse of the person my grandfather could have been. He gave me my love of dancing, poetry, Greek mythology, old movies, peach pie, coconut cake, and the beauty of Japan and the Japanese language. He also gave me my appreciation of a well-dressed man and the importance of a really great hat. He will be missed but I am glad he will finally have some kind of peace. May his spirit soar in a way it never could on earth.

In the words of Irving Berlin, from a movie my grandfather and I watched quite often together:

Sayonara, Japanese goodbye
Whisper sayonara lover don't you cry
No more we stop to see pretty cherry blossom
No more we 'neath the tree looking at the sky
Sayonara, sayonara
Goodbye