Recovery

By M. Hopkins

‘Ex’-alcoholic smokers tend to be challenging people to get along with, I know.

You aren't necessarily proud of your choices, but you’ll fiercely defend them

and then you look back one day and realize you've pushed aside all the people who cared about you and

you're lying in a hospital with a broken hip and

the only reason your son is there is because he tracked you through the NYPD and it worked out.

Not because you answered the concerned calls or bothered to explain your trip to CT, or anything a normal grandfather would do.

You were never the same from that day on, and

even though you didn't want to talk much, you wanted to live with us, and

so you did.

I remember when you arrived, fresh from rehab and some time in a nursing home, and you eased into our life quietly and curtly.

Instead of loving you and letting you know as often as possible, I let myself be

upset by your abrupt answers to childish queries and the way you let mom serve you hand and foot for half a year

with barely a ‘thank you’ and never a ‘please’.  

And then I left, hugging your frail body in the hospital bed, and said goodbye to the grandfather who had come every Christmas (but never another time), and

walked away.

And when I came back to visit, you were asleep so I didn't say goodbye again.

The next time, it was you who had left, and there was nothing I could do.

I stood on the phone, mute and unmoved.

I laughed at your funeral.

Recovery is a work in progress.

I wasn’t grieved that you were gone. Your world was better in the quiet, Times in hand, muttering about how foolish young people are--

I don’t know what to say, except that I’m sorry for resenting the parts of you  that I saw in myself and that, at the core, I’ll always be your granddaughter.