February 17th is a complex day. It’s my brother’s birthday, and it’s the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. So today I went through the day wondering how my brother would celebrate his birthday, whether the package had arrived for him yet, and how this new year would treat him. But then, as the sun set, I started remembering Grandpa.

I remember one summer when I was maybe 12, maybe 13, and I spent the week before the big family reunion out at Grandpa and Grandma’s house on the lake, helping them prepare for 5 families to descend on their grounds. Grandma was the general, no, the commander in chief. There were long lists of things to do, and she kept me and Grandpa plowing right on down that list. I particularly remember that we had to mend the screens in the gazebo. As we patched the screens using fishing line and an old set of medical skin-sewing needles, I mimicked the birds that I could hear. All of a sudden, my bird-loving grandpa looked up in surprise and said he hadn’t been able to hear that bird in years. It took us both a minute to realize he could hear my mimicking but not the actual bird itself (his hearing having been damaged in his WWII tank-driving years). So for the rest of the afternoon I would mimic every bird I could and he’d identify them for me as we patched and sewed, patched and sewed.

Later that same week, with the descent of many families looming closer and closer and Grandma’s list still massively long, I remember helping him hang a door between the two bedrooms in their house. From the great room, Grandma called “Honey! Remember you still have to hang that door today!” And my grandpa looked down at me with this gentle smile and a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye and called back, “Yes dear.” Just that. That moment forever defined him for me: patient, gentle, unflappable, happy to share a secret with me.

I remember that twinkle appearing less and less often as he got sicker and sicker. I remember the tired frustration as he lost the ability to communicate with us. I remember dreading our last Christmas, when we knew that he couldn’t live much longer, and I remember hating myself for that dread.

I remember his funerals, too, and wondering how any of us would have the stamina to get through both of them. I remember wondering how I could have gone for so many years and not realized just how sad the 23 psalm could be. And I remember avoiding looking at my grandma, avoiding seeing her so unsure of herself, so grey, so much like charred paper that had curled into itself.

What I can’t remember is his voice. The MSA altered that for so many years before he lost it entirely that I cannot pry its sound into my memory no matter how hard I try. I’ve been told he had a clear tenor voice. I’ve been told he was a wonderful singer. More than any other thing about him, I wish I could remember his voice.

Growing up, my family’s vacations involved a lot of people, a lot of luggage, a lot of hours in the car, and some rather incongruous songs.

As we carved out spaces for our legs and feet, shifted pillows, blankets, and bags around to make little nests for ourselves, and set off toward the highway, my dad would belt out “Gloom, despair, and agony on me / Deep, dark depression, excessive misery / If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all / Gloom, despair, and agony on me!” After that uplifting ditty, he’d move on to Leonard Cohen’s “Oh please, don’t pass me by,” and “Passing Through.” These, he would belt out at the top of his voice, filling the car with depressing lyrics but delivering those lyrics in the most jovial way.

Dad got a Cohen CD for his birthday this year, so the rest of us heard to original versions of those songs for the first time. And you know what? They sounded happy, lyrics notwithstanding. They sounded like vacation. They sounded like my legs should be wedged in among rolled up sleeping bags and my head should be resting against the car window.

I catch myself daydreaming these days. I’ll look up from my keyboard, where my hands will have gone still for seconds or minutes or an entire week in summer when I was 10, and feel the same pang under my ribs that I did then, the summer I first saw my cousin inject himself with insulin. He was so proud of the power he had to hold the entire crowd of cousins enthralled as he drew up the dosage. He giggled with glee as we all gasped, surprised that he’d chosen his stomach as this time’s injection site. We’d all had vaccinations, and we knew that shots went into upper arms, not stomachs. And I remember sitting there long after he’d run out to climb trees or jump in the lake or dig for worms or whatever else all the young cousins were doing. I sat there and was grateful that I didn’t have to break my skin multiple times every day, or learn how large a smear of blood would be sufficient for testing, or have my mother check on me in the night to see if I had miscalculated my evening balance of food and medication. I wondered if he’d been boasting when he said the needle didn’t hurt. I wondered if he worried about his little vials of insulin breaking in his travel bag.

Walking across town these days, I’ll realize with a jolt that I’ve walked a block and a half rather than back from my grandma’s house to the gazebo, carrying orange juice that he forgotten he needed near him in the night, stepping carefully over boys wrapped in sleeping bags and having flashlight wars on the gazeebo ceiling.

Or I’ll look into the mirror in the bathroom and be surprised not to see my 13-year-old face laughing back, having just marked off the two full minutes of tooth-brushing his dentist required. He hated it that his mother had enlisted us all to mark off the time with him as we brushed. How embarrassing to have cousins check up on you. Rather like having them ask if you’d washed your hands. And yet there we all were, brushing and laughing and planning our next swimming expedition to the lagoon.

Getting ready for work in the morning, I’ll put down the brush that’s been hovering inches above the vanity, inches above the arm of hospital room’s chair, inches from the sheet that covers his burns. Blinking, I’ll remind myself that I’m not there, that I haven’t seen this, that I don’t know what it looks like, what it sounds like. I’ve never seen deep burns. I’ve never heard a ventilator (at least, not while I was awake to understand what I was hearing). I don’t even know if there is a sheet. All I know is what comes to me in the daily email updates. All I wonder is how anyone can endure this.