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The oldest, and most telegraphed of the three passings this year was my Grandma’s.  We’ve known for about a year or two that she was suffering from cancer, and her condition had notibly deterorated from about spring onward.

Grandma was adventerous, often worried about us kids, and religious.  We had been making the most of her time left, planning a slew of family reunions and bringing in relatives from California and Hawaii, but only my younger sister saw Grandma in her final bed ridden days.  Still, she had copious amounts of cheer.  A devout Christian Scientist she accepted and wasn’t afraid.

She passed away at the end of summer, with her two sisters by her side.

At her house in California, we held a non-traditional funeral with music and food stations spread throughout the pool deck area and the living room, per her request.  It was like a get together, and a surprising amount of people came, invalidating my theory that the older you get the more you lose contact with people.  Some people came to honor my Grandpa, who passed away when I was a kid.

Grandma’s death fell upon me numbingly.  During one point in her life, she moved to Clarendon Hills to try to connect with us grandkids, but it was largely a failed attempt.  The generation gap was just too large, and although I now appreciate her attempts to culture us, at the time it was just a bother.

We thought she was a bit too uptight, along with the rest of our religious relatives.  While preparing for the funeral, my extended family further treated us like children, which only served to divorce me from any pain of her passing.  Jon felt the same way, but spoke the truth when he said, “At the very least, she’s responsible for our being.  We owe her for that.”

This left my dad as the de facto head of the Kimball family now, as the oldest male.  Living in Chicago, he wasn’t able to be with her at the end, and he spent his time working on the CB360T engine in the garage.  When he got the call that Grandma had passed, he was cleaning out carburetors.

Grandma’s death illustrated to me a lesson in aging and respecting the elderly.  At the get together, the slideshow showed she was a beauty queen as a young adult.  The remarkable American beauty was nothing like church going senior citizen I knew.  It’s sometimes hard to believe that every geriatric walker using pensioner was once a rebelious 20 something with dreams and a probable disrespect for authority.

I just wish I got to know that side of her better.

Mr. Helms was my friend’s dad, but treated me like an adult and peer.  We always chatted when I visited Chris’ place and when I began working at the same place as him, we sometimes had lunch together.  He’d ask me if Chris and I still hung out which I always thought was a funny question considering I saw Chris about every weekend and talked to him daily on the forum.  Mr. Helms offered his support for my career, and although we were in different departments I really felt like I had someone who had my back.  Having him there to confide in about how much I didn’t like my job meant a lot to me.

When I first started at my current position, all my much older co-workers said that their hobbies include “Nothing” and “I have kids”, which depressed me when I saw that my career path and life led to them.  But Mr. Helms proved to me that old dogs can learn new tricks, and I found comfort in the fact that growing up doesn’t mean settling into a lifetime of TV watching and driving your kids to soccer practice.  I admired him so much more than any adult I have ever met.

It wasn’t just that he played the guitar, worked on classic cars, or built models… it was that he learned to do many of these things while an adult with children and mortgage and a job that was neither glamorous or full of riches.  He had his dream job once, and sacrificed it. He sold his ownership in his hobby store to spend more time with his family, in the process taking his final job at the place I work for steady money, security, and benefits.

One day while at his cabin early in the year, Mr. Helms passed away.  He was decently fit, and had no overarching medical problems, so his death struck swallowed up our group like an earthquake.

I had always hoped a part of him would be reflected in me when I grew older, but when he passed I thought about my own dad.  The funeral reminded me of the fact that my father will die one day, but I do believe that it is every father’s goal to die before his son, so even in death, Mr. Helms succeeded.  I also think it’s fitting that he passed away at his cabin, away from the suburban two car garage and Metra commute.  I think he would have wanted that.