It’s A Bad Day, Not A Bad Life

My dead grandpa talks to me through a picture. In the picture he wears a black, oversized sweater. The exposed brick wall of the kitchen is behind him. It’s a picture of us, he’s holding me, as a baby, on his lap. I’ve got orange food on my white sweater.

It’s weird that he moves and I don’t. I’m frozen in a wet mouthed giggle while he’s in motion behind me. Grandpa didn’t always move. He used to sit on the frame of my bedroom wall and like every other picture, he was frozen and silent. Then, on an unassuming Wednesday afternoon, in my empty apartment while I ate the sushi I had ordered from my phone, he said, “That’s the fourth time you ordered out this week.”

I spent a couple of weeks of thinking I was crazy, pushed over the edge from hours in solitude thanks to a pandemic or something. I contemplated putting the picture in a box and driving it three hours to my grandma’s basement. It felt fitting, it used to be his favorite place. It was mine too at times when my parents left me for days, weeks, or months on end.

I didn’t lock him away to collect dust in my grandma’s basement. If I really was crazy it felt wrong to punish his picture for my insanity. I got used to him, though. Since he died when I was five, I didn’t exactly know him well. I learned that he’s stuck inside the mental space of the moment the picture was taken. Apparently, he’d had bad pains in his back that day and he still never shuts up about it. He’d also just gotten into an argument with grandma, so he wasn’t her biggest fan. The argument was about how much money she spent on things he didn’t seem to think was necessary. I don’t know if he was always so frugal, or just extra sensitive because of the argument, but he is very critical of my spending habits.

Many times, I wish I could cover the picture and block him out or something, but I know the guilt would eat away at me. He only wants to talk, after all, and he told me I made bad days better. The picture was taken on a bad day. The day was bad because something had triggered his PTSD. He told me this halfway through watching The Hurt Locker, after asking me to turn it off. I tried to be sympathetic, but his disapproval of modern technology, his need to boss me around, his insistence on telling me how not to do this or how to do that, and his not so subtle homophobic views (as spotlighted while watching Love, Simon) was getting more or less tiresome.

Finally, one day, I ask him, “Why did you come to me?”

Grandpa’s picture blinks steadily. He says, “You came to me.”