Cold Water in Fiji: Life Lessons from a Grandfather

Two weeks ago, I was in Fiji working and about to start the weekend when I received a call from my dad. It was the worst kind of all calls, the ones where you instantly know that things are not okay.  My grandfather had died. 

In that moment, and the many more that followed as I stayed to finish teaching my Gender & the Law course to 45 committed law students from around the South Pacific, I was about as far away from my family and loved ones as possible. Essentially alone but for the company of my extraordinary and joyful seven year old human. 

I painfully deployed my “Life Is Beautiful” parenting strategy, doing my best not to let the grief and loneliness of my loss invade my son’s experience of Fiji. Not letting my sadness corrupt my students’ experience of my class. Working double time to hold off a flood of feelings until I would be back in the U.S. and would have the luxury of space and routine and my Brooklyn home to grieve the loss of one of the most significant people of my childhood, of my life. 

But that first weekend - as I treated us to a weekend in Pacific Harbor as part of our Fiji trip tradition - it was my son who did not allow me to ignore some of the selfless and generous contributions my grandfather made to childhood. From the first moment we arrived at our hotel, and the weather was cool and cloudy (it is, after all, winter in Fiji), my son was begging me to go into the pool with him. I was cold and sad and tired and the weather was not at all inviting, and yet... 

A foundational memory of my grandfather, because it must have been repeated more than a thousand times over the course of my childhood, was begging him to go into the pool with me and my sister. No matter how cold the water or air was, no matter if he just came home from his job at Falk Corp. and was still in a button down shirt, no matter how tired or how much he must have wanted to just relax at the end of a long day, my sister and I were there - waiting, pleading for him to come into the pool with us. 

And he always did.  

We learned to swim in that pool.  Spent summer days and nights in that above-ground pool, made whirlpools by walking in circles, played "little fishy" and did flips and handstands in that pool.  But we almost never, ever would go in alone.  It wasn't enough to be watched from outside the pool - we wanted him IN the pool with us.  (To protect us from Jaws, naturally.)  And he always went.  He always came in the pool, because it made us happy.

So there I was, in Fiji and faced with a small person who wanted nothing more than to spend time in the freezing pool with me. Shivering and smiling and shrieking with happiness. Making memories with me that will hopefully last a lifetime. And that whole weekend my grandfather was there in the dark shadows of my grieving mind, reminding me to suck it up and go in the damn water - to set aside my sadness or chill for the benefit of an oblivious child who simply deserved to be happy and have fun during his summer vacation. So I did. 

I went in the damn water. 

That weekend and the ones that followed, each time my small human asked I went into the water, without complaint, and thought of my grandfather.  I thought of all of the other things he did quietly and simply to make my sister and I happy, no matter the inconvenience, cost or discomfort to himself.  The thousands of times we pretended to be asleep in the back of the stationwagon just to have him carry us into the house in his arms.  The too-numerous-to-count times that he would answer our adolescent calls for help when we would run out of gas after curfew, and he would silently show up with a gas can to rescue us - never telling anyone or even chastising us.  It is only now, that he is gone, that I reflect on these moments and think to myself how extraordinary they were.  How much I have to learn from them.  How much they are a part of the fabric of my childhood experience.  How they are some of the best memories I have as a kid, spending time at my grandparents' in Wisconsin.

It is because of these little gifts that I look at my son just a little differently now.  How I feel and respond when he pleads to be carried, and how I would like to think his own grandfather will respond if he ever calls him to bail him out of a youthful irresponsibility at 1am.  And above all I hope, thanks to the lessons learned in my own childhood, that my son some day looks back on his childhood and is warmed with feelings and flashes of love given, in even the smallest of gestures.  All the times I said yes.  And went in the pool. 

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