A Giant amongst Men

Yesterday, November 11, 2012 around 2PM, I learned something new. Something I vaguely remembering hearing about as a child, but was intangible in my adult life.
Yesterday I found out that people die.
It may sound strange because we're all taught and told that death is, ironically, a part of life. We see people die in movies and even cartoons all the time. But the road runner still gets chased by the coyote everyday and Denzel accepted an Academy award after his death a few years ago. But apparently, real death doesn't work like that.
Yesterday I found out real death is silent and painful and nightmarish if you live through it.
For almost 20 years of my life, I ignored it. Almost didn't believe it was real. I guess I thought it was a figment of my imagination. But it isn't.
My grandfather, Charles Thomas Hall, Sr. passed away when I was 5 years old. I remember the day he left and I vividly remember his funeral. What I was wearing, how my hair was, where I sat, who I sat next to, my older cousin telling me that boys were physically unable to cry and not being able to utter a word even though I knew she was wrong.
After that day, death, to me, no longer existed.
I assume this is in part because to ease the pain of losing someone who was the light of my life, my family explained to me that he was still somehow there. Just not physically. He sat on the fluffiest clouds and watched over me as I played and studied and cried and laughed and grew. But when there were no clouds in the sky, I wondered where he went. When there was a blizzard or a storm, I wondered if he was comfortable.
Sure other people passed after my grandfather, but no one as close as to me as he was. Going to see him yesterday was the most strange feeling I've ever experienced in my life. I remember the day my grandfather left. I know how he left. I know that prostate cancer wreaked havoc on his body.
But for some reason walking up to the KW section of the Veteran's Cemetery to grave 1116, I was hoping he wasn't there. I walked up to him and stood there bent over in tears, completely in shock by what I saw.
A headstone...with his name on it. And to make matters worse, below his name was his birth date with a dash separating that date from another date signifying the end of his...
After I caught my breath, I sat there and tried to talk to him, read to him, sing him happy birthday and ask him how he was doing, but nothing came out. I just kept picturing the man that carried me on his shoulders and sang me funny songs as dust in a box six feet below me and I couldn't believe it was real. I hadn't visited him, in that place since I was about 12.
After all of this time, death was staring in my face, with it's deafening silence and faceless glare and I never expected it.
How...Why would I expect to see my Pop-pop standing there in his whiskey colored bomber jacket, arms open wide, aviator lenses raised on his cheeks because of his smile, saying "I've missed you Muskrat" with that Mississippi drawl that had notes of Brooklyn all under it that made his speech so memorable?!
He died. On June 12, 1993 that voice was silenced. Those arms bent with his hands over one another. Those aviator frames revealed eyes that would be shut for the rest of eternity. That smile lay straight. Reality slapped me in my face and knocked the wind out of my lungs and I never saw it coming.
Yesterday I learned that people die. But only if you don't do what God sent them here to show you.
Physically, Charles Thomas Hall. Sr. lived from November 11, 1935 until June 12, 1993.
However, the man who is responsible for my humility and my defiance, my dreams and my hustle, my disdain for mediocrity and complacency and my compassion for those who help themselves turned 77 years old yesterday.
A giant amongst men.
Your dreams are my dreams and therefore we still have work to do. Plans to execute.
And if I hope for nothing else, I hope that I'm making you proud.
dig and be dug...