Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

~*~ the here and now. ~*~ the done and gone. ~*~ who am i? ~*~ find more like me ~*~
say something to me. ~*~ what they've said about me. ~*~ feel left out? ~*~ get pretty. ~*~

for my grandfather, who will never get to see this.
2008-12-28, 12:09 a.m.

current mood: the saddest i've ever been, and the most angry, too.

current song just the sound of rain outside my window.

Marvin "Red" Scherz was one of the most amazing men i've ever met. considering i have a fourth of his genetic material, i can only hope to be a fourth as amazing. he was my Grandfather.

we should have known it was coming, we should have seen the signs. the things he said, the way he acted - he hadn't been the same for weeks. at christmas dinner, he said "well, this will be my last christmas anyway", and a smattering of things like that.

the day after christmas, when it was quiet, and he was alone, he shot himself in the head. he was 82.

this was the man, that, at 17 years old, enlisted in the navy and didn't tell his mother until it was time for him to ship out. he didn't even graduate - the awarded him his diploma after he came home. he was shipped to saipan, the only welder on an island full of marines and army soldiers. the marine captain ordered four of his men to be his body guards, and when they protested, he declaired, "tell you what, if you can learn to weld in the next five minutes, then you don't have to be his body guards." they didn't say a word about it again.

this is a man who spent a night in a foxhole, with a downed tree in front of him, giving him enough room to see a bit and point the barrel of his browning smg. he stayed there all night, firing in bursts, killing japanese soldiers as they ran down the hill. he told me that in the morning, he was buried in the brass, burns all over his chest and arms and face.

this is the man that spent fourteen days behind enemy lines with a marine whom he was on patrol with. they stayed in a cave, as the japanese ran over them. he told me that he caught a salamander, and tore it apart and ate it - if they had started a fire it would have given them away. his mother recieved a letter from the government, saying he was dead or missing in action. finally, his unit pushed the line back, and they ran back to camp.

this is the man who came home on the train, carrying his friend, who had gotten so drunk on the way home he'd passed out, relieved to be home after the war.

the man who hitchhiked across the country after the war with the same marine he was trapped behind enemy lines with, just to do it. they got stopped in alabama by a sheriff notorious for arresting people just to get the work on the roads done, and arrested for vagrancy, where they were forced to work on a chain gang for thirty days. there's more to this particular story, but i'm not going to tell it here.

this is the man who met his wife because he wrecked his motorcycle - she was the secretary at the insurance agency. he'd gone there to report the wreck.

this is the man who got into a fight with an entire baseball team, over his brother's first wife. he'd stopped at a bar to get a bite to eat on the way home from work, and seen her there, sitting on some guy's lap. he finished his food, drank a beer and a shot, and went up to her. he yelled at her for being there, and the guy who was fondling her said, "don't you talk to my wife like that." he, of course, became ten feet tall, and grabbed him by the collar and threw him into the four other guys sitting with him. he must have forgot that there are nine players on a ball team; the nine of them beat the crap out of my grandfather. he went back, the next week, with five friends and some baseball bats.

this is the man who had two children, my mother and my aunt. he loved them, though he never really knew how to show it. he took them on vacations. he brought them home animals whenever he and his friends went hunting. he brought them home a bear cub - the mother had been killed, and he felt so bad for this little bear that he fed it crackers soaked in whiskey and put it to sleep, and then put him in a duffel bag. back then, they flew across the canadian border frequently, and customs always merely poked their heads in the plane. they did so on this trip as well. when he got back, my mom and aunt stood by the plane door, just waiting for something - it was usually a turtle or a frog or something of that sort. as he was throwing the duffels out of the plane, he set one gently on the ground, and it started to move, and when they opened it up, there was boo-boo the bear. this bear loved the kids, and took to them like a dog; he stayed in the back yard behind their house. as we all know, baby bears become grown-up bears eventually. when boo-boo was full grown, he could stand and put his paws on my grandfather's shoulders - grandpa was 6'4". eventually, one of the neighbors called the game warden, who came in his brand new car to take boo-boo away. my grandfather said fine, and put the bear in the back seat of the car as the game warden ordered. boo-boo promptly began to tear the car apart; ripping the headreasts off the seats, tearing the fabric off the roof, and eating the game warden's hat. when he saw what the bear was doing to his car, he decided that it was best to leave boo-boo and come back later with a trailer. boo-boo then went to live in the columbus zoo until he died, and there's still a plaque there, telling his story.

this is the man who served as a policeman in clyde, who ran his own insurance agency, who taught welding classes at the vocational school in tiffin. the man who played with his grandchildren. the man who taught us to hunt and fish and shoot as we all grew up. the man who picked me up from the hospital when i'd wrecked my car, and there was no one else to come get me.

this was the man who loved his wife so much, that no matter how sick she got, he took care of her. as she declined, he put new steps on the front of the house, put rails and a chair in the bathtub for her, and carried her from room to room. finally, when she got too bad, he decided it was time and pulled the plug on her - at this point her alzheimer's was so bad she didn't know who any of us were anyway. he still held her until she died. he said that he could still hear her yelling for him in the middle of the night, after she'd died.

i'm now sobbing as i write this; not because he's gone, but because i never spent nearly as much time as i should have with him as i've grown up. i had started to, i was spending tuesdays with him, having breakfast at the moose and hanging out all day at his house, listening to him tell me stories. i'm crying because i'm sure there are so many stories i've never heard, and now i'll never hear them.

my grandfather was many things. he was a husband and a father, a grandfather and a friend. he was a soldier and a welder and a teacher. he was an award winning shooter and a hunter. he spent his days playing poker and trading stocks online. he was strong and brave and loving and kind.

he was sad and lonely, too. as much as we didn't want to think it - this man, this strong, brave man - had been reduced to a "white haired mild mannered little old school teacher", as he liked to say jokingly. inside, though, he was watching his body wither away around him. he always said he didn't want to die in his own piss, in some sad nursing home, living out the rest of his days on food from a blender.

well, he got his wish. i hope to god that he's in a better place. i hope to god there's something out there, some place where he's warm and happy and young, and with his wife and his friends. i don't want to think about it being any other way.

grandpa, i never said it enough, but i love you so much. i talked about you all the time, i admired you so much more than you'll ever know. goddamn it, all i want is just one more day...one more day to have breakfast at the moose and listen to your stories, to smile and laugh again. i want one more day to tell you i love you and hug you. that's all i want in this world, and i will never have it.

you selfish fucking bastard...i can't believe you've done this. i can't believe that you'd do this. why didn't you call someone? anyone...me or dad or alex or aj or anyone...why didn't you say that you were so sad? why didn't you tell us? did you think that we didn't care? did you think that we didn't want to be bothered? goddamn it all, we loved you, we loved you so much. you know, i hate you for doing this to us. but i hate myself more for not giving you a hug before i left on christmas.

~*~ immediate yesterday. ~*~ divination. ~*~

~*~ entries from 2002 ~*~ entries from 2003 ~*~ entries from 2004 ~*~ entries from 2005 ~*~ entries from 2006 ~*~ entries from 2007 ~*~ entries from 2008 ~*~ entries from 2009 ~*~


sign in for me, would you, dears?
get your own guestbook here