I should have seen it coming, I guess.

First it was my grandfather – my mother’s father.   James Dalton was just out of his teens when he emigrated from County Limerick to Chicago in the mid-1910s. He was a handsome, strapping, farm-grown lad – a touch over six feet tall, with a big chest, broad shoulders, and a face that moved from deadpan to delighted in an instant. He was a talented musician and dancer, and according to my grandmother, caught the eyes of most of the young ladies in Chicago’s bustling Irish community.* She told me this a half-century later, as we sat side by side in metal chairs, fishing for bluegill off a Wisconsin dock. She tilted her head toward Grandpa, dozing in the shade nearby, his hat pushed down over his eyes. “And would you believe it now?” she said with a half-smile.

In my earliest memories of him, Grandpa Dalton would have been in his late 60s, maybe early 70s: impossibly old to my kindergarten-aged self. He moved slowly, a bit bent at the hips, with a serious, even stern look much of the time. He liked to laugh, though. It’s just that sometimes his face didn’t show it.

We visited my grandparents in Chicago a few times a year. We lived five hours away, in southern Indiana, and the sheer amount of parental work involved in moving six kids anywhere, especially on a trip long enough to invite a dozen pee breaks and at least a couple of us throwing up in milk cartons at any one time, limited our visits mostly to holidays.

So, I saw Grandpa in vignettes—mental time-lapse snapshots taken every few months. With each visit he seemed a bit more bent over, his gait slowing, his speech quieting, his face less mobile. On one visit, when I was in mid-high school, Mom mentioned to Grandpa that I was six feet tall now. “He’s as tall as you were when I was a girl,” she said. Grandpa looked me up and down in mock seriousness, as though measuring me. Then he patted the top of his own head, a good half-foot beneath mine. “Sometimes I can’t believe myself,” he said with a resigned sigh.

Grandpa lived with us for a year after my grandmother died. He brought a bag of prescription bottles with him. When I was loading them into the medicine chest I noticed one marked “L-Dopa.” What a weird name for a medicine, I thought. I asked Mom about it and that’s when I first heard of Parkinson’s disease. I’ll admit, I wasn’t very curious about it at the time. All my older Irish relatives seemed to have wobbly gaits, tremors, hearing aids, and canes. I figured Parkinson’s was just another name for getting old.  

A heavy smoker, Grandpa was something of a medical miracle. Given his lung disease, Parkinson’s, prostate cancer, and a raft of other medical challenges, he had no business making it to 90 years of age. By the time he died – run over by a car shortly after his 90th birthday party – he was bent forward, his back curved in a near semi-circle, as though, if not for his walker, he would have collapsed forward until his head rested on his knees, giving up his long fight with gravity once and for all. 

Grandpa’s body may have failed him, but he died with his spirit intact, singing his songs and telling his stories of Ireland right up until the end.

Next up in “Family History”: Mom’s turn…

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*Grandpa played the concertina. His sister, Kit, played the violin, and their parents and siblings pitched in on a number of instruments. Their childhood home in County Limerick was always filled with music; when the children grew up and moved on, a neighbor lamented, “It was all so very quiet… .”