Ted Braffet, 1932-2025

My grandfather died on Saturday. He made it to 93, once his kids intervened and cared for him full time. Drunk Wife had been spending all his retirement money on booze and Uber Eats for herself while he had been subsisting on snack food, until he had an accident that alerted the family to his health conditions. He played guitar and made jokes until the end, even when his memory started to go. Dementia can change a person’s personality, but he stayed himself.

I am having complicated feelings about his death. This is going to be all over the place, because my thoughts are gathering and scattering like mice, or murmurations of birds. Grief is weird.

I didn’t have a father, and grandpa made it clear he was not my parent, but he was the closest thing to a dad I had. My youngest aunt, Robin, was 12 when I was born, and Beth was a teenager. My mom cooked her way through university while taking care of me. Living in the family home, I was almost one of the kids, but not quite.

Grandpa made bread every Sunday, and gave me a little ball of dough to copy him. He rolled and pinched a row of perfect loaves and put them into big aluminum pans while I squashed and mangled my little ball of dough into a greasy lump and dropped it in a tiny pan to rise next to them. He always laughed about how my mini loaf would rise and bake to look exactly like all the carefully prepared loaves, and he let me eat the entire little loaf with lots of butter. Fresh warm bread is still my favorite food.

He sat me on his knee while we watched Indiana State and Arizona State football games. I didn’t know what was happening, but I liked picking a color to root for and clapped when the medics had to come check on a concussed player. 

He played banjo and guitar, singing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, Fox Went out on a Chilly Night, and some silly folk song about a clumsy guy blowing himself up in a cotton mill. He loved Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and Willie Nelson. He brought me to the university, where he was a professor of education, and I watched him develop film in the dark room. He loved photography and ceramics, and he loved my grandmother. He wrote a song for her and played it on his guitar until he died, even after his memory left him.

I didn’t cry when my grandmother died. I was 13. I had grief and foggy thoughts, and it hurt to see my mother cry, but I just couldn’t. It worried me a bit. I thought it was because of what happened when my mom and grandpa got in a fight in front of me one morning at breakfast when I was about 5. Instead of stopping him when he punched her to the ground and dragged her across the kitchen floor by the hair, grandma took me by the shoulders and led me to the living room, sat me on the couch, sat down next to me, and waited with her hands folded in her lap. No words, no hugs, no expression on her face, she just turned away and let me cry, and I was so upset and confused. Grownups are supposed to fix things. I could understand an outburst or a temper tantrum from one grownup, but I couldn’t understand the other grownup letting them beat up their kid. She should have stopped him. 

I finally cried for her now, though. Their story is really over. They met in the art department at university in Arizona, fell immediately in love. Mark was born when they were 24, as they worked through grad school. 

Chrissie came a year later, then my mother, Mary. When she was about 7 months pregnant with my mom, grandma got very sick, very suddenly. Grandpa was out of town, so she packed up the babies and tried to make it to Kingman, where his mother lived, but she only got as far as Wickenburg before she gave birth prematurely. Two things saved my mother’s life: the doctors were so busy and the birth was so quick that they didn’t cut the cord right away, so she got all that cord blood into her tiny body; and the hospital in Wickenburg had just gotten something brand new to 1959, which the Kingman hospital did not - preemie incubators. She was 3lbs, and they didn’t expect her to live. They guarded their expectations and let the toddlers pick her name (“Mary”, because they liked it, and “Carol”, their neighbor), but great-grandma got involved and kept picking up that tiny baby, turning her over so her little head wouldn’t flatten on one side. 

 

my grandfather's grandmother 

my mom

There aren’t a lot of really early baby photos. Grandpa’s best friend, a photography buddy from the Navy, had all the negatives, and his daughter threw them out. (That daughter is Drunk Wife, who grandpa married after his friend died in a car crash. Grief is weird.) I once saw a beautiful photo of grandpa holding my mom in one hand when she was born, but it’s gone now. They put all their belongings in a storage unit to move to Vancouver for grandma’s cancer treatments, and when she died he was lost. He forgot to make the payments, and everything went to auction.

He told stories. When he was 15 or 16, he and his friends drove around rural Arizona. One night they came by to get him and he didn’t go, and all of his friends were killed when they ran into a stalled vehicle on a dark road. He was the oldest child, his mother was 15 when he was born. His dad, Casey, was a teenager too, and joined the military to support the family. Casey fought at Iwo Jima, and never recovered from seeing a tiny bloody shoe the size of his daughter’s in a cave they found. They blamed his heart problems on the war, but he had broken his leg as a kid and a blood clot broke free and lodged in his heart; half his heart died in his chest, and it came apart when they tried to resuscitate him. Casey died before he was 40. It was a really bad way to go, and the family never got over it. Grandpa joined the Navy to support the family until his mom remarried.

After my mother was born, they moved to Guam, where he and my grandmother were teachers. 

He built a catamaran in the living room of their house, then threw a party with beer while all his friends took the wall off the house and pulled the boat out. They had the wall nailed back on before the police showed up. They lived on the boat, and sailed to Japan, Yap, and Hawaii, where they studied ceramics with Claude Horan. They survived several typhoons, underground in abandoned bomb shelters. My mother remembers all the palm trees stripped of leaves, just bare sticks in the air, standing alongside toilets perched on plumbing, the houses gone. My grandma, at full term, went into labor with Beth during Typhoon Karen, but the minute the nurses asked who she would send the baby to on the mainland - as there was no running water - her labor stopped. She held that baby in for another month, and gave birth the day the water came back on. Grandpa came to pick up the baby on a motorcycle with 6 year old Mark on the seat in front of him, and Mark held that baby tightly as they drove back home. Grandma went on birth control after that, but Robin came along anyway a couple years later. 

With 5 kids, the oldest heading into middle and high school, they moved from Guam to Indiana, and grandpa worked on his PhD in Bloomington. A colleague roped him into teaching for part of the year at Memorial University in Newfoundland, which turned into full time work when he finished his dissertation. Grandma got a job as a medical librarian at St. Clare's Mercy Hospital, and they moved with the two youngest to Canada. They gave my mother $100 when she turned 18 and said good luck. The oldest two got married and stayed in Indiana, but my mother got pregnant, dumped my dad when he said she either had to marry him or get an abortion, spent the money he threw at her on plane tickets, and went to Newfoundland. Her parents weren't happy with her. Her kidneys failed, and she spent 3 months on bedrest in the hospital, but they didn't visit or bring her books to read. She stared at a crucifix on the wall for months and gave birth on a snowy morning in November.

They were good people, but bad at having 5 kids. They should have had the first two and been done, spending their lives traveling and reading and making art and playing guitar. They weren't racist, religious, sexist, or puritanical. The outbursts of violence were unusual and coincided with times of great stress, otherwise they were benignly neglectful and busy with their own lives - and each other, because they had that kind of love. 

Grandma had a congenital kidney problem, which Zenny inherited. Zenny had the good luck to be born in a time of early diagnostics and robot-assisted micro surgery to repair her kidney valves, but grandma suffered all her life with kidney infections and pain, until a young radiology tech accidentally blasted her with hundreds of times too much radiation during a test in the late 1980's. She developed leukemia and died in a span of about 5 years. I remember right after it happened - the first sign that something was wrong was when she fainted in the shower, and EMTs came to carry her out of the house. Grandpa was a wreck. They traveled as much as they could before she got too sick, visiting us on the Navajo reservation when we moved, spending time in Indiana with their other grandkids, driving to North Dakota to see grandma's family. 

She was in North Dakota when she collapsed and lost her vision, and they had to rush back to Canada. At the end, they let her go back to the apartment they were renting in Victoria, and she had a few last good days with grandpa before one morning she went for a swim, laid down to rest, and never woke up. Grandpa laid there with her for hours before calling anyone. 

 

We just get this one life. I don't think it turned out the way they hoped, but they had adventure and love. I guess I was waiting for them to be back together before breaking down about it. Chrissie called us all in a video conference early Saturday morning and told us, crying, and showed us his body. He went quickly and painlessly, just checked out and left, and you can't ask for much better than that. Chrissie deserves a goddamn medal of valor for not dropping the phone and throttling Drunk Wife when she piped up in the background about how long it'll take to get his insurance money. 

 

So I am baking a lot of bread and crying. I don't know what to do, and I'm not trying to figure it out. My brain is foggy, my chest hurts, I'm sad and angry and feeling mortal, and that's all as it should be. It's okay. 

Bluer By Its Very Weight (Ted Braffet, 1966)

We walked the beach my son and I barefoot in the coral sand.
Tiny creatures scurried to attend affairs along the ocean’s edge.
The seabreeze mingled with a musty smell,
Of green and growing things,
Of bright and looking things,
Of dead and rotting things.
Above the high water mark and where the green began,
The trees and brush and spider webs
Choked off the trade wind flow.
The dusty suffocating heat in there
Could melt the zoris off your feet
And so we splashed along the edge,
My son and I
Ankle deep
Or just a little deeper,
for my son.

Overhead the noonday glare reduced our eyes to squinting slits
And cast shadows pooled in black which huddled underneath our feet
My own was scarcely bigger than my son’s.
Great anvil clouds sliced clean white rows
Across a sudden blue reflecting sky.
The color scarcely faded where it met the sea
And drew its geometric line
That centered
Both my son
And I

Swirling crystal clear around our feet the sea turned pallid green
Then lemon lime out by the reef.
While on beyond the surges white line
The sudden blue reflecting sky
Opaqued the surface of the sea.
The blue went seven miles down, enriched and thickened
By its steep descent, made bluer by its very weight
Locked prisoner in the Ocean’s
Deepest trench.

We walked the beach
My son and I
Holding his small bronzed hand
We walked the beach
My son and I
Barefoot in the coral sand.