My grandpa Edgar “Ed” Hansen passed away on Friday June 7th around 10:25 in the morning, two days after his 94th birthday. He lived well and died fighting.

I started to write about all the things I learned from him, but lately – despite my intentions – Writing Something has been a hill to climb. All that white space on the page, trying to make ten fingers connect with everything in my brain…it’s overwhelming.

Creativity is better with limits so I started this as an Instagram caption then hit the character limit and moved it over to Facebook. Somehow only having to see a paragraph at a time made the words come. (Also there was gin.)

So, my grandpa. Not grandfather, but grandpa.

His obituary notes he went to Lane Tech High School and was a purchasing agent at FJW Industries. Somewhere I have this old, blurry photo of him sitting at his desk in a short-sleeved shirt and tie with a sign in the background that says something like “Keep off the purchasing man.” I think it was a promotional sign for some service. The photo is a window into another era.

He was, too.

God, he was funny. Any time more than three people were gathered around a table he’d sit down, size everyone up and rest his thick forearms on the table and with a glint in his eye, he’d crack a smile and say:

“So I suppose you’re all wondering why I called this meeting.”

He was a man from another time. Rat Pack timing combined with Catskills shtick, Ronald Regan hair, George Hamilton’s tan, and Johnny Carson’s suits. He was short, but had the strength of an ox and the body of a boxer with Popeye arms.

He had a desire for order and structure brought on by a childhood in an orphanage and early adulthood in the Navy during World War II.

A cereal for every weekday. Breakfast dishes laid out before bed. He ironed all his own clothes, including his underwear.

He was the first to leap up – not get up, but leap up – to open a door or help a lady with her coat or teach a gaggle of kids in a restaurant how to make it look like you were bending your parents’ best silver.

Talking with him was like dialogue out of an old black and white movie. The Thin Man meets a Jimmy Cagney flick.

“How are you?”
“Compared to what?”

“What have you been up to?”
“Staying off the streets and out of trouble.”

I learned a lot from him. I forget which bits I stole from him and which ones are my own.

The shtick got him through a lot of the years near the end. The bad years when dementia and Alzheimer’s started to eat away at his mind and his body. If you didn’t know him and talked to him for a half hour, you’d swear he was on top of his game. But it was like catching the 6pm show at the Copa without realizing the 8pm show was exactly the same.

He met my grandmother in the 1940s on the Northwest Side of Chicago when he was 17 and she was 14. They were together until she died five years ago. There’s a good story about how they met and like most of his stories it’s a mix of apocrypha and vivid detail. I don’t know how much of it’s true and don’t much care.

My grandpa was manly in that classic way that mixed a no-nonsense attitude with kindness and chivalry. You do what your parents tell you and go to church on Sundays. No lady opens her own door in his presence. A man drives the car and carries the packages. Be nice to old ladies and children. Drink scotch and black coffee. Own a pool table. Mow your own lawn. Flirt with respect.

One time he took me to see Empire Strikes Back but I ate too much candy and felt sick so he took me home with no complaints. In retrospect, I really appreciated that he didn’t make me “tough it out.”

Fuck Alzheimer’s, man. Grief is hard enough without having to dial back a few years to remember who your loved one really was.

I’ve had this photo on a bookshelf for a long while now. I don’t remember how old it is, but it’s at least five years old, but less than ten. His wavy hair, dark sunglasses, windbreaker, and easy grin make him look like an aging jet pilot. It’s taken at Arlington Racetrack and he’s got his arm around this blond woman who’s maybe in her late 20s and holding some kind of elongated trumpet. She looks as if she’s about to compete in an equestrian competition and then welcome the Royal Court of Upper West Farthingtonshire.

It is equal parts ridiculous and curious, just like him.

In the last days of his life he was pumped full of morphine in an attempt to keep him comfortable. My grandpa was not a man who liked to be comfortable.

A day before he died, his mental and physical states deteriorated, enough narcotics in him to make a horse take a nap, he kept trying to get out of bed. A man who’d been retired for decades insisted to his grandchildren and daughter that he “had to go to work.”

Ed Hansen died in bed but lived every day of his life with strength.