My grandfather would hate me writing this column. But he never read any of my writing as far as I can tell. He never bought me a Christmas present, never asked me how classes were going or showed much interest in my daily life. But he did teach me how to dig up potatoes, fix toilet plumbing, catch Japanese beetles at twilight in a jam jar. How to talk to a dying man. That's slowly, waiting until he has caught his breath, not asking too many questions, getting him water or melted sherbet, sitting quietly, being there. Switching on the golf at two.

My grandfather took a long time dying. This whole fall semester he was in decline. I wonder if I seemed callous to my roommates.

"How's your grandfather?" they'd ask.

"He's not dead yet," I'd reply with a smirk.

I felt like him.

You don't want to hear how he is. How he can't make it to the bathroom by himself anymore, how the side of his face harbors a gaping unhealing wound--the result of an operation to remove a cancerous growth. As if that was more life-threatening than the fact his bone marrow was no longer producing blood cells.

How he stopped going to church this week, how he stopped driving his trash to the dump the next, how he stopped getting up for lunch, then breakfast, then at all.