The walls are white; not a hospital white, but the sort of white that always looks like it has a fine layer of dust covering it. They’re walls I’ve spent hours, probably days, starring at over the past seven years of my life. From time to time they’ve been covered with a clock here, or a picture frame there. There’s scuff marks on the paint beneath the window- the remnants of my little cousin’s ‘art project’ nearly six years ago. She’s eight now, if you can believe it. She grew up inside these walls, and I don’t think the irony is lost on anyone that we watched someone deteriorate at the same time.

She’s a bit of a fire and brimstone child, not so different from me at that age, and I worry now that in ten years when she’s lived and loved a little, she’ll feel exactly like I do now. Because out of all the cousins, Natalie never knew who really lived in this white walled room. Sure, she’ll remember Christmases and joint birthdays, and walks around the park. One day, she might remember curling up on a warm lap in the summer sun. That’s all she’ll have, though. She might never realize what she missed. Who she missed.

The rest of us, the oldest four, we’ll remember a time before these walls, though. We’ll remember beach days and model cars, and trekking through the forest. Miles told me earlier that he remembers six hours in the car to Banff, when he was seven. I don’t remember that. It’s the harsh reality of a new world we’ve been sitting on the cusp of for seven years, and all of a sudden we’re in the deep end.

My grandfather had a stroke on the 23rd of February, 2001. It claimed everything it could while still leaving him alive. He never regained the use of the right side of his body after, and his mind, as sharp as it had been for as long as I could remember, never was the same.

I was thirteen when it happened. Grandma’s death was still lingering and suddenly the stable little world our family had returned to was taken again. It was so unfair. It still is. It’s so unfair to loose both of your grandparents when you’re thirteen. Jason, and Joshua, and Miles and I understood Grandma’s death, but how do you explain to two twelve year olds, a thirteen and a fifteen year old what a stroke is?

How do you explain to them that the person they admire most in the world won’t ever play football with them again, or teach them to change a car tire? How do you make a thirteen year old understand that Grandpa might never know who they are again?

You can’t. Those are the things that we had to learn the hard way. It was seven years of learning that he was never going to get better, and that the lifetime we all thought we had to get to know him wasn’t a lifetime at all. I had thirteen years to get to know him, and I didn’t even know the things I wanted to know.

Today, I wouldn’t know where to start with everything I want to know.

The wooden dresser beneath the window has only ever been half-full with mismatched socks and knitted sweaters, and a few toques to fight against the chill of Canadian winters. The bottom drawer contains two pairs of slacks and a handful of button down shirts, each one as neatly folded as if Grandma had done it herself. The sweaters are each lovingly worn and soft as I pull them out, fingers snagging on the wool. They’re Grandma’s legacy; a warm embrace on a cold winter day, or a soothing cup of tea when life is painful, and Grandpa loved each and every one she made for him. We all loved every one she made for us. Mine are packed away in the chest that Mum and Dad bought me for graduation.

All but the one I’m wearing today.

It’s a brilliant sky blue color that matches my eyes. Grandma picked it because it matched all of her grandchildren's eyes. Eyes that we inherited from Grandpa. There’s a picture on my apartment fridge of the four of us grandchildren and Grandpa in the backyard of their house, each wearing one of these sweaters. It was the last sweater Grandma ever knitted for me, and it was almost like she knew, because it hangs down over my skinny twelve year-old wrists and almost down to my knees in that picture. I didn’t grow into it until I was nearly eighteen.

It was Grandpa’s favorite sweater, and I’m riffling through the remaining sweaters, pulling it out to inspect. He wore it every chance he could, and in my mind there’s no other outfit that reminds me of him quite like this sweater. It’s worn, and I know Aunt Sarah is going to protest over it, but anything else just wouldn’t be right. This is the sweater he should meet Grandma in Heaven wearing.

The drawers are almost empty, and I grab the small suitcase from the closet beside the bed and load it. The sweaters Uncle Jon will probably keep, and the rest we’ll donate to charity like we did when Grandma died. We donated most of their furniture to charity too, when we had to sell their house. Grandpa lived alone in it for only four months, and after the stroke he couldn’t live on his own anymore. It took weeks and weeks to clean out their house, and it was the worst feeling in the world.

I might not have understood what had happened to Grandpa, but I did understand that the memories of my childhood at their house were being boxed up and sent away for other people to have. In hindsight, I probably made the process harder on Mum because I wouldn’t stop going from room to room yelling at people to stop packing things. It’s one of those days that I can close my eyes and see my thirteen-year-old self standing in the shed fighting with Uncle Jon over Grandpa’s tools that he was packing up, and Dad hauled me out by the waist kicking and screaming.

It was a wonder the neighbors didn’t call the cops. I actually have the tool set that Uncle Jon was packing up that day; I got it for my eighteenth birthday, and it was the first time since the stroke that Grandpa said my name- “Happy Birthday, Kherri”. Josh pointed out once that it was probably because everyone kept saying it, but I really think that that night Grandpa knew that I was his little Kherrington.

Everything happened so quickly, and then our lives, post-stroke as we joked, began again. Holidays were spent in the hospital, and as the boys got older we used to all trek over to the hospital once a week after classes and push Grandpa in his wheelchair outside. It became a habit, and Grandpa was always looking to the door Thursdays at 4pm for us, whether he knew what the day and time were at all.

We grew up, and we never had to adapt our lives because we didn’t know anything different. We knew, of course, that we were different. There was a conspicuous absence of grandparents at awards evenings, and at dance recitals and high school graduation. I won’t lie and say it was easy, because it wasn’t. It was simple in some ways, because there was never the option of having Grandma there with us. But knowing that Grandpa was asleep in his hospital room as I walked across the stage to accept my high school diploma was a kind of heartbreak no boy could ever cause.

Until that point it was easy to ignore the nagging feeling that I didn’t know exactly who I was because I didn’t know where I had come from. It wasn’t as if I believed that knowing every detail about my grandparents would suddenly give me this brilliant clarity into who I was, and I could skip over the remainder of my confused teenage years. All I wanted to know where the little things; the things that made Grandpa… Grandpa before he was a father and a grandfather.

I wanted to know about his years in high school, and how he became interested in cars, and even where he met my Grandmother. I wanted to know about his years in the war, and what it was like in England and France and Germany for him. There were days when I wished I could go to him for advice about boys, or what school subjects I should take, or just reassurance that, braces and glasses aside, I was just as pretty as Ashley Jacobs no matter what some stupid boy said.

Today there’s even more I want to know, like what song Grandma and he danced to at their wedding, or what his first job was when he got home from the war. I watched a special on the Avro Arrow last night, and I sat on the couch and cried for almost an hour because Grandpa worked on it, and I never got a chance to ask him about it.

It’s not like any of us didn’t try. I may have had the most patience, but Jason had spent what probably amounted to days over the last seven years sitting talking to Grandpa about his life and his loves, and there have been many. We weren’t the only ones either. I often found Mum sitting on a chair pulled up to Grandpa’s bed, and on more than one occasion I found her asleep with her head on the bed. I think we all tried to act as if everything was normal sometimes, but you couldn’t deny that it wasn’t.

I think Grandpa understood what we said, somewhere inside his head where the stroke and old age hadn’t gotten him yet. But we never knew because he didn’t always have the ability to respond, or ask questions, or even acknowledge what we were saying. I remember once sitting crying my eyes out over a broken heart, and he had fallen asleep. That was just how it was.

“Kherri?”

It’s almost as if I’m looking at Grandpa sixty years ago; right out of a picture from the 30’s with his blue jeans and the top two buttons of his black shirt undone. Out of the three boys Miles always looked most like Grandpa, but I’m struck with just how much he has grown into the shaggy brown hair and long eyelashes that dominate the family photo album.

“You okay?”

It’s an obligatory question, and Saturday I’ll be giving obligatory answers as people offer their condolences after the funeral. But Miles is family, and so I shrug my shoulders and busy myself with undoing and redoing my ponytail. It’s not that I’m not okay, but it’s more than I don’t know what I am.

I’m a mess of conflicting emotions, and Miles, and the twins, are probably the same way. Our parents, and Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jon, they’re not okay. But us cousins, Natalie included, probably aren’t so sure. How can you mourn for a person you didn’t really know? There’s no book that can explain how you’re supposed to deal with this kind of grief. The kind that you spend seven years coming to accept and understand because each day after the stroke we lost a little more of Grandpa.

Are we even mourning? Or are we sad because there’s no room anymore for idealistic dreams of a ‘second chance’ to know him? It’s a horrible feeling as a grandchild to not know if you’re missing the person who you think your Grandfather was, or if you’re missing who he actually was.

“Do you think he’d be proud of us?”

Miles is standing across the room from me, pulling pictures off the corkboard that was put up a few weeks after the stroke. The contents have changed hundreds of times over the years with school pictures, and Natalie’s drawings and, recently, Miles’ wedding photos. He’s tossing them onto the empty bed with a certain care that the trained eye of a little sister can pick up.

I can tell he’s exhausted from the six hour overnight flight he took from Vancouver to get here, and I doubt he slept like I told him to when I left Abigail and him at my apartment. Abby, I suspect, headed over to Mum and Dad’s to see what she could help with, because Abby’s just like that, but sooner or later I knew Miles would show up.

“You know he loved Abby. She’s perfect.”
“I don’t mean Abby.”

There’s a pause, and I turn from the closet I’m riffling through to look at my brother’s back.

“I mean would he be proud of the people we are. Of what we’ve done with our lives? Would we be different people if he’d been able to give us a push in the right direction when we were teenagers?”

Miles and I have always been close, despite a massive gender and a small age gap. We just never bickered, or fought like other siblings did. Individually, and collectively, we put our parents through hell when we were teenagers, I think, but we always had an understanding that the other was the only one you could really rely on at the end of the day. It’s the kind of bond that can’t be forced on you.

I think it's why Miles has often been known to say the things I’ve been thinking, but only much more eloquently.

While Miles has the eloquence of a future lawyer, I have the nature of a philosophy student. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have developed an interest in philosophy, or history, if it hadn’t been for Grandpa’s stroke. Would I have been as driven to sort out the mysteries of life, or the complexities of human nature if I had been handed all of the information on a silver platter?

The honest answer is that I don’t know. I’ll never know, just like Miles will never know if Grandpa’s advice could have more directly influenced the person he is today. Indirectly, no one has had more influence on our lives than Grandpa. We’re all a product of what’s happened in our lives, and Natalie may be the best proof of that. Grandpa’s stroke affected every part of our lives, but we’ll never know anything different.

“Maybe, maybe not. He probably would be, yeah.”
“But add it to the list of things we’ll never know?”

His head is bent over the empty bed, organizing the corkboard contents into piles. The list joke began when we were teenagers as a way to ignore the obvious reality of the meaning. But it’s not as funny anymore, and I know the smirk that would have been on a seventeen-year-old Miles’ face isn’t there now. I don’t have anything to say to it; no one probably does. There’s nothing anyone can change now, is there?

“I’m done.”

Miles is staring expectantly at me, and I motion to the suitcase near the door. I’ve got Grandpa’s jacket and a nice shirt on hangers in one hand, and with the other I reach for the pillow. It’s an instant compulsion; for seven years it was my favorite task to fluff Grandpa’s pillow for him. My fingers linger on the fabric for a second, giving it a little fluff just for memory’s sake.

That’s all we have to go by now, in whatever form they may take. Mine aren’t much, and they’ll never be enough, but I’ll hold onto them all the same.

I flip the light switch as I leave.