My grandfather carried a gun well after he lost his sight to macular degeneration. He also walked with a knife-cane around and around the block with his poof-of-a-dog, Tiger.
When I was fourteen, he taught me how to drive in the cemetery (before losing his sight altogether), cracking jokes along the way about running over mourners.
He was a fearful man. At fourteen, I understood that.
He stood on his head, chanted funny phrases, read the mystics, and announced his enlightenment at family events to indifferent cousins, eating brisket or kugel off a paper plate. This too, I understood as an expression of his fear.
When his vision became completely obscured, he gave me his car so I could drive over after school and read to him. My mom made me promise to yell my name as I knocked— Pop, it’s me, Ben, your grandson, Ben! Pop, it’s me! —so he didn’t shoot first. I never believed he’d pull the trigger, just wave the gun around like he did with the pizzaman who agreed not to press charges.
He chose a book called Proof of the Afterlife, as if it might be that simple. We got six chapters in before I started making excuses. The truth was the book frightened me. So, my mom hired his neighbor, but she only read the classics.
He never got to hear if there was any proof.
We still talked plenty, mostly about music. He insisted that music was a devotional practice: the purest kind. He also insisted that I understood him, that I was the only one, when I didn’t understand him at all.
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Tiger went first, of natural causes. And that’s what they called it when Pop died soon after. But unlike Tiger, there were no natural causes to point to. No proof…
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Continue reading in Thirteen Bridges Review, October 2026 Issue