Remembering Grandpa

 I have always been a little surprised by the concept of eulogies. We say all these nice things about people, but they're not around to hear them. Why don't we say these things while they're still alive?

As my grandfather lives out his final days, I thought I would write out my memories of him while he is still alive. Even so, I don't know if he will know what I'm saying, since he is blind and mostly deaf. 

Foundations

David Ebbert grew up in Ohio. Eventually he joined the Air Force, and he served in North Korea during the Korean War. 

In 1959, he met and married my grandmother, a divorcée with three young children. A few years later, he officially adopted my mom and her siblings. My mom remembers that when they told her they were going to change her name so she would have her dad's name, she was skeptical about having her name be David. 

In the 1960s, they moved to the Air Force base on Guam, and while they were there, they converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was a significant shift, since Grandpa was a heavy smoker and a borderline alcoholic. Ever since, my grandparents have been the most devout of the devout. One of the highlights of my career in Mormon history is when their story was featured on the Keepapitchinin blog. 

Then they moved to Nebraska and eventually to Utah in the early 1970s, where they have been ever since. 

My Memories

By the time I came along, they already had ten grandchildren. There was the older set of grandkids and the younger set of grandkids, and I am squarely in the younger cohort. 

They lived in a house in Holladay, and this was a special place. It had four levels, an above-ground pool, an ice cream parlor, and a pool table that I never got to use. I remember some of the house's idiosyncracies: the floor that turned purple under the rug next to the glass doors, the couch that made a boing noise, the wallpaper of vintage cars. They had glass display cases with their very niche decorations: expensive castles, Lladró figures, and 1980s Relief Society projects. Every time I smell the kind of shrub they had in their front yard, I think of that house. I loved playing with maple "helicopter" seeds. 

We had family parties there at least once a month, and they gave very generous gifts to all the grandkids for their birthdays and Christmas. They always had a supply of fruit snacks for the grandkids, which we called Turtle Snacks, since some of the time they were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Grandpa was a bishop, so he had many church meetings in the '90s. One time when I was five, my mom picked up their friend from the airport, and she was very drunk. Since Grandpa was still having bishopric meetings, my mom wasn't going to drop off this drunk lady at their house, so we hung out with her, and I thought she was mean and weird.

I turned eight right before general conference, so I was going to have to wait more than a month before I was baptized. But because Grandpa was a bishop, we got to use his church building conference weekend so I could be baptized. 

The following summer, G'ma and G'pa left on a mission to Samoa. Since they were converts, they never served a mission in their youth, but they loved their time in Samoa (I think), which was a life-changing event for them. They dutifully called on our birthdays and sent us gifts. When we picked them up at the airport, I gave Grandpa the leftover carrots from my lunch that day, since I erroneously believed they hadn't had carrots in Samoa (and because I didn't want to eat them).

Soon thereafter, they moved from the Holladay house and into a condo called Old Farm.

At the turn of the millennium, they were new great-grandparents and loved that role. I remember G'pa taking my cousin's daughter Anna to the window to look at birds when we visited. 

At Old Farm, Grandpa once again served as a bishop and in a stake presidency. They also had a service mission at the Church Office Building. When I was in eleventh grade, he took me to a high school production of his favorite musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so I could get credit for my theater class. And one July evening, he took me and a few of my cousins to his ward's fathers-and-sons activity. I remember him telling the people there that most of his grandsons were very quiet, but there were two who made up for the rest of us. 

During this time, he began to lose his hearing. 

My Adult Life

When I was in college, they would attend various BYU activities. He loved BYU, even though he didn't attend himself. They would always take me to dinner when they came down to Provo. 

One time in 2012, we were playing the Ungame with my cousin Jesse, and he got the question, "Who is your hero?" He said Grandpa, even though Grandpa wasn't there at the time.

They also began a service mission at a high school for troubled girls.

After I graduated from college, they moved again to a different condo, this time in Centerville. Now that they were in Davis County, I got to see them more often. There were many Sundays when I would bake something and take it over to them. 

They opted to supply the turkey every Thanksgiving. One time my mom made a comment about hopefully having the pies done in time, and G'pa quipped, "If I don't get pie, you don't get turkey!" (I never was a fan of G'pa's undercooked meats, however.)

In recent years, G'pa also began to lose his sight. This was devastating, since he already struggled to hear, and he loved to drive. G'ma and G'pa loved to travel. They even drove from Utah to New York and back in 2017, when he was eighty-five. But his lack of sight prevented travel in recent years. He had to have his right eye removed on Halloween night.

Last spring, as they faced declining health, my grandparents decided to move in with my sister, a built-in nurse. I think we will all be forever grateful for my sister's sacrifice. And they even decided to get a puppy, something that was unexpected, as they had never had a dog when they were adults.

Final Days

A few weeks ago, Grandpa entered the hospital with erratic heartbeat and blood pressure. Even though he was hospitalized, he remained alert and cracked jokes. For example, he asked me to come and bless the sacrament for him and Grandma. He said that after the sacrament, he would ask me some questions. I was expecting him to grill me about something serious. But he said to me, "Why do editors hate April?" He had been listening to a Book of Mormon institute manual (which is not something I would choose to listen to when I only had a few weeks left), and he noticed that the robot voice would pronounce April (in citations) as A-P-R, but it would say all the other months. I told him that I guessed the robot was just not trained to say Apr., even though it was trained to fully say Oct. and Nov. A week later, he assured me that he was listening to another book, and this time it did actually say April.

He is back home on hospice now, and he decided to no longer take medicine to regulate his heart. It could be a matter of days, maybe weeks. We still visit him, and he still has moments of alertness and humor. When Grandma accidentally spilled milk on him, he remarked he was getting a milk bath. Tonight he said, "Part of why I know it's time to go is because I finally found a Grisham book I don't like" (he has been listening to audiobooks) 

At this point, it is hard to feel sad for him. As he has lost his hearing and especially his sight, he simply isn't the same person he once was. I feel like we have already been mourning him for several years now.

Even though he isn't biologically related to me, you would never know that with the way he treats his family. Blood is thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood. 

I can't say that I'm very much like him. I will never share his love of football, golf, and Lladrós. He was a bishop twice, and it is extremely unlikely I will ever be a bishop, for several reasons. But hey, we both like cats and pie!

This is a hastily written post that does not do justice to his life. But there will never be such a post. He cannot be reduced to a mere blog. He made our family what it is, and it won't be the same without him.