My Grandfather

It was raining outside, and my whole life had come undone. I was 24, and we were in the middle of a pandemic. My stepdad, who had been depressed for years (a mix of chronic back pain and midlife crisis), had finally snapped. He had been emotionally abusive for a long time, choosing me as the target of his frustrations, but today things had come to a head. Yelling that I’d closed a door too hard, he chased me around the home with bloodshot eyes, yelling that he would kill me if I ever did something like that in his home again. As my mom stood between us and tried to de-escalate, I realized that if I stayed, one of two things would happen: he would seriously hurt me, or I would seriously hurt him. It might not be today, but things had been getting worse for a while, and they’d already escalated: first from whispered grumble to searing resentment, and now to a credible chance of physical violence. For a second, I thought of staying and barricading my bedroom door for the night: I was honestly not sure whether my stepdad would try to hurt me in my sleep.

So I left. I packed my clothes into a suitcase, tried to cram all the books I really cared about into a backpack, and loaded my computer onto my car. I hugged my crying mother goodbye and told myself it would be easier this way - my stepdad had never treated her with the same vitriol he did me, and my brother was his son, which granted him protections I’d never had.

Then I got in the car and drove to my grandparents. It was the first place that came to my mind.

They were sitting in their living room, watching the night time telenovela. My grandmother lying down under a blanket, my grandfather dozing off on his reclining chair. A portable space heater plugged was plugged into an outlet next to the TV - it made the room toasty, and my grandfather kept the doors closed to keep in the heat. They didn’t hear me come in - I’d had a key to their front door for years. When I opened the door, it startled them awake.

They sat me down next to them and I told them what had happened. My grandmother asked questions, tried to comfort me, tried to feed me. She went into a frenzy, getting a bedroom ready for me, figuring out if she had enough clean sheets, moving another space heater next to my bed in case I was cold. My grandpa stayed silent, in his chair. He looked at me and said: “Stay as long as you need.”

My grandfather wasn’t a man of many words. I think that had less to do with how much he had to say, and more to do with his ability to communicate. Like many men from his generation, he was uncomfortable with his own feelings. He did not like to think of himself as an emotional creature, and he was far more comfortable working with machinery he could break down into its core components, take apart and tinker with until he understood how it worked. He could fix anything - my aunt has used the same toaster for a few decades because he kept fixing it whenever it broke. Whenever one of his family members brought him something to fix, my grandmother would say: “Está perdido por hoje” - “He’s lost for today”. He would disappear into the depths of his garage, and forget to eat if we didn’t force him to come inside. He would work at things until he could make sense of them, until he could conjure some order up from chaos. I used to think it was just his obsession, an urge to tinker that any mechanic would find familiar. As I aged, I understood it was not just that, but also the fact that his family were the ones asking. This was an opportunity for him to be there for us. This was us asking for help, and telling him how he could provide it. None of those complicated feelings that needed processing, none of the traps of interpretation. This was as simple as it gets: we needed him, and he was there. There was no possible alternative.

My grandfather worked himself to the bone to get to the position he was in. My aunt and my father, his children, have a different perception of him than I do. He was a strict man, and he missed much of their childhood to work. He had a temper, and his inability to handle complex emotions gracefully was not easy to live with. When my mother and my father got divorced, he never talked to my mother again. From then on, without fault, he would go back inside when my mother dropped me off, ignoring my grandmother’s pleas, the requests for forgiveness. In his mind, my mother had hurt his child, and that was all he needed to know. He was stubborn as a mule and immensely proud.

I met him after he had mellowed out, and while I saw glimpses of the man he had once been, I was his first grandson, and so I got preferential treatment. He was much less strict with me. Most importantly, he had retired, so he got to be present. Work could no longer keep him from his family, which meant he could be around much more.

And present he was.

For most of my life, he was there, side by side with my grandmother. My first memory of childhood is of sitting in their kitchen while my mother and my father, in the process of getting divorced, screamed at each other outside. My grandmother smiled at me, reassuring. My grandfather remained silent, turned on the cartoons for me, and told me to eat my soup. They felt safe. They felt sane.

He took me to tennis practice and walked me back home multiple times a week. He would always arrive early enough to see me play, not just pick me up. Often he would sit through the whole practice.

He ate lunch with me all throughout highschool. My school was close to their place, so I would walk there on my lunch break and eat with them. He would brag about how the coffee machine had broken for the seventieth time and how he’d fixed it in time for lunch, scoffing at the suggestion that he buy a new one.

He drove my grandmother to swimming lessons every weekend and would sit in the bar next to the pool, reading the newspaper. At the suggestion that he, too, could benefit from some swimming, he would wave you away dismissively, and say: “I get enough exercise around the house.” He would wait until my grandmother was done, then drive her home and get the car ready for them to go to mass at the end of the day. He would lay out some plastic bags in the trunk of his car so my grandmother’s flower arrangements wouldn’t get it dirty. He obsessed constantly about his car, cleaning it every day, making sure it was pristine, an emblem of his care and understanding for the machines under his wing.

My grandfather gave me my first allowance. Twenty euros a month all throughout highschool, that I used up to buy Yu-Gi-Oh cards or saved up for video games.

My grandfather was married to my grandmother for his entire adult life. When they had their 50th wedding anniversary, they asked me to read at the ceremony. I could see the pride in their eyes as I did.

Later in his life, I used to go to his place just to wash my car with him. He would greet me, then get his stuff, a man in his eighties carrying heavy buckets full of water and bending in ways that I could tell weren’t easy for him. I never asked him to do it, but I never stopped him. We had an unspoken agreement that this was our time together. We would stay silent, for the most part. Enjoy each other’s company. If any of us had anything on their mind, it could wait until the job was done. He taught me how to do it thoroughly, lovingly, with care for a job well done. He would point out the spots I missed and polish off the scrapes that my reckless teenage driving sometimes caused. Then, we would lean against the wall in his driveway, and talk. Sometimes it was pleasantries, the weather, how things were going. Sometimes it was something serious - I once talked him into admitting, clearly embarrassed, where the bruise covering half his face had come from. He told me he’d tripped and banged it against the wall when reaching for a bottle of wine, and asked me not to tell the rest of the family. He didn’t want them to think any less of him, think him old and clumsy and incapable of fending for himself. He knew I could never see him as smaller than he was, so he told me what he wouldn’t tell the rest of the family.

I used to scoff at the idea of privilege - a silly, defensive reaction that I had to outgrow. I’ve had many fortunate things happen to me: I’m a white man born to a first world country in Western Europe. My mother understood the value of education and instilled in me a deep love for reading from an early age. And I’ve been lucky, so lucky, in many aspects of my life.

But when I think of my privilege, I think of my grandpa.

Grandpa was the safety net. He was the person who was there if everything else failed. When I switched careers from the humanities to Computer Science, he got me the computer I needed to start developing. He helped pay for the course. He took me in, fed me, housed me, clothed me, and let me take risks. More than once I thought to myself: “well, if all else fails, I can always go back to my grandparents’ home and lick my wounds for a bit”. I did not understand how massive of a privilege that was until later in life, just as I didn’t realize how much it had cost him to get into that position. Being absent from a lot of his own children’s education; his calloused hands with one finger missing, crushed by heavy machinery; his capacity for work that came from decades of overworking himself, to the point where not much could phase him any more. I don’t know if they were all for that - I don’t know if he had the presence of mind to predict the good that could come of it. But all of those put him in the position to be able to help his family, and he used it to become the safe haven I grew up with. He paid for his children’s mortgages. He helped me buy my first home. Whatever he thought of his earlier years, he tried to make up for them in the best ways he knew how to.

When I first met my now wife, I told her about my grandparents. I told her about how so much of the way I view relationships is informed by my grandfather, and by seeing how much good someone can bring to the world by simply giving his family the room to fly. The room to dream and to try. I wanted to do that for my people. I wanted to be able to be for my brothers and for my wife what my grandfather had been for me. I wanted to make sure I was in a position to help, even if it was never needed. I wanted to be there.

There is so much more to say about my grandfather. He loved his collection of pens, and would take me up to his bedroom once a year to show me the new additions to the collection. He would always let me choose a pen at the end, wanting to share his love for them and kickstart my own collection. He would listen to the radio in the front seat of his car, with me in the back reading one of my books, while we waited for my grandmother to come out of her parish. He would go around turning off all the heaters in the house, wanting to keep the electrical bill under control, even when it was freezing. This infuriated everyone, but we just turned them back on. He would never complain, just do another round later and turn them off again, a silly dance that lasted for the whole winter.

He learned once that my wife liked Mateus Rosé wine as well as Almond Liqueur (Amarguinha, popular in Portugal), and from that moment on gifted her a bottle every time that we visited, making sure he always had one at hand in case she popped in.

He once tried to get onto the roof in his early 80s to fix the cable, and I had to physically stop him while he complained that he was perfectly fine and I was being a scaredy cat for nothing.

He would call me every weekend to go have lunch with him and my grandmother, and grill meat for the whole family if everyone else was around, or take us to a restaurant if it was just the three of us.

He taught me the importance of doing things well, of taking pride in your work. He taught me the important of taking care of your people, and that the reason to work so hard is to be in a position to do so. He taught me about the immense amount of good that comes to those around you, if you dedicate yourself to giving them the space to shine. He taught me about his flaws, and showed me that you can be a great man without being perfect.

Even as I write this, I fear all of the things that I won’t remember about him in a decade. I feel like I am leaving out so much, in spite of my rambling. I hope by putting some of these things down in writing I can remember them better, but I dread whatever has already slipped my mind.

My grandfather made me who I am today. They stay we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that could not be more true - me, I stand on my grandfather’s shoulders in so many ways. Without him, I would not have achieved a fraction of what I have today. I struggle to put into words how much he meant for me, and in that there is some irony - he would have struggled too, grunted something non-committal, then found some other ways to show it.

My grandfather died this Monday, September 8th, 2025, in his own home.

I sincerely hope he knew how loved he was. More importantly than that, I sincerely hope he saw just how much good he put out into the world by existing. If ever I’ve helped someone, that was his work.

He was a good man. He did so much good to those around him. He lived a good life, and he leaves a hole that cannot be plugged. But for all that he taught me, I will do my best to provide others with the privileges he provided me. I will strive to be in a position to do good, and then try to give people the space to fly. And when they fall, I will be there to catch them, just as he was, always, for me.

This is my favorite picture of him: it shows him and my grandma holding a young me, pure joy and pride in their eyes. I am so proud to have had him as my grandfather, and I hope he would still be proud of whoever I become.

Note: This post is less edited, less revised, than many of my other ones. I wrote it emotionally, and plan to leave it up like that.