Grandfather on the Ice

Grandfather’s on the ice

Waiting for the tide

To pull him out

The tide?

Is that what the tide does?

We’re not sure

We’re not exactly a scientific people

We put our grandparents on the ice floes

And then we walk away

But two months later

We’ve returned

To spend our long weekend

By the ice

Engaging in leisure activities

Such as—Not Freezing to Death

And—Casual Shivering

And what do we find?

Grandfather—Still on the Ice

Still alive and feeble

Withering away

At the ripe age of forty-two

He’s been existing solely on fish he catches with a net

He’s made out of his own hair, which, luckily for him

Is falling out at accelerated rates

‘Grandfather,’ we yell from a safe distance

Scared to approach him

Since it’s likely he’s now feral

‘You were supposed to float out to sea

And die a dignified death

Of exposure and starvation!’

He doesn’t respond to us

He simply melts ice into a cup

He must have smuggled out of the village

We would never have allowed him

To bring a perfectly good cup

Onto the ice floe with him

Why bother?

And now he’s used it

And his hairnet

To keep himself alive

Well, this is an abomination

After a night under our seal pelts

We wake up at dawn

To find him behaving strangely

Then we realize what he’s doing—

Exercising!

He’s exercising!

It’s as if he has no urge to die at all!

We apologize for our excessive use of exclamation points

In this part of our story

But we mean to infer

The extreme level of agitation

Brought about by seeing how spry and able-bodied

Our dead grandfather was

Because, at this juncture, he is essentially dead

We’ve mourned him

We’ve wept

We’ve divided up most of his valuables

And accused our cousin of stealing his prized cup

Causing quite the rift in our little clan

Only to find out that Grandfather had it

This entire time!

Where do we go from here?

--We ask ourselves

What is to be done?

Our mother, who so grieved when she parted with her father,

Suggests harpooning him

And calling it a day

But, we say, you cannot kill him

For he is already dead

We find ourselves

In quite

The conundrum

Grandfather, for his part, seems to be in great spirits

He’s made himself a little ice chaise

On the floe

And a little ice table

And even a little ice dog

That we see him petting occasionally

Well that’s it, we think, he’s lost his mind

--And this makes us very sad

It’s why we put him on the ice floe

When we did

It’s a horrible thing

To lose one’s sense of self

That’s why we send our elderly out into the everlasting water

Before their minds have a chance to deteriorate

We’ve estimated that the mind begins to erode

Around the age of forty-three or forty-four

And so, we’re always sure to send our elders to their deaths

A year or two before that

How do we come to these estimations?

Well, it's not an exact science
In that it's not exactly a science
More like a feeling
A discomfort
The air of an ending
The trailing off of someone's life

Grandfather sits on the ice floe
And we sit on the shore
Two sides of time
Bound by a line
That goes even deeper
Than the cracks in the ice
That separate the safe from the drowned

We need him to die
So we can stop thinking about him dying
Because thinking about him dying
Makes us think about our own deaths
And those are unpleasant thoughts
That make living difficult

It is, we suppose, the unfortunate thing about death
That it has a way of ruining life
If you let it

We take a few steps towards Grandfather
Sitting on his ice chaise
Petting his ice dog
Whittling a shard of frozen water
Into what looks like a totem

As we approach him
He lets out a breath
And we take ours in

There's a lap of water
There's a whale's howl
There's a cut and chop the cold does
When you insist on walking through it

We extend our hand to Grandfather
And he smiles
As if he knows something
We don't

Then--directly underneath us
The ice
Begins to crack