OLD GREG

Greg was the kind of ornery old man that you would think only existed on television. So comically contrarian that sometimes you have to ask “why are you like this?” But those old guys… they do know things you don’t know. And if you stick around, you occasionally learn something.

I liked Greg. Not all of the time, mind you. He was a huge pain in the ass. But yeah, I liked him.

He was the kind of guy you would come up with if you were asked to describe what an Eagles fan looks like. Despite his vocal nature, he lived a quiet life. His social outings consisted of nightly (and sometimes daily) visits to a bar called Mama’s. There he drank and he gambled everything away. His vices held a tight grip on him and he was fine with that. But ultimately, those didn’t matter much.

No, it wasn’t the whiskey or the online poker. It was the cigarettes that finally got him.

Greg got the diagnosis at the end of 2018. The doctors prescribed radiation. He went to get his treatments in the mornings and would go back to work afterwards. And like clockwork, I would find him out in the parking lot, smoking another cigarette.

One afternoon, I caught him doing just that and I felt the need to speak my mind. “Greg, I don’t want to go to your funeral.”

The cigarette slipped from his lips just long enough for him to retort, “I’m not having a funeral. They’re just going to put me in the ground and be done with it.”

As things got worse, he spent less and less time at work.

When he got to work in the mornings, he’d sit in his truck… just trying to breathe. It took a while before he’d have it in him to get out and get to work. Finally, one Saturday he sat in there for over a half hour. I was working more and more by his side just to help out, but I’d never worked his job by myself. It became clear that he needed to go home, so I told him so. That was the last day he ever worked.

I told him to call me when he needed things. Groceries, his medication and what have you. He only asked a few times, when he could barely get out of bed and didn’t have the strength to drive down to the pharmacy.

The last time I picked up his things, I paid for them. It was twenty bucks. Not much, but I knew he couldn’t be doing well financially. Greg never saved a dime, having gambled away whatever he hadn’t drank. So it was a small thing, but I paid for it.

Greg wasn’t happy with me. He said “thank you”, but was upset that I wouldn’t take his money.

Before I left, he had me take a photo of him, for posterity I suppose. He’d lost more than twenty pounds. He was wearing his work uniform, despite no longer working. It hung on him like a blanket. That was very likely the last photo ever taken of him.

Before the end, I got a call from his estranged daughter.

Greg never got on well with his daughter. With respect, I’m fairly certain it had more to do with him than her. But knowing that his father was fading, she left her family and took a leave from her job to be with him in his final days.

She said he’d asked her to call me. He wanted me to pass by his apartment to say goodbye. She didn’t phrase it that way, but we both knew that was the implication.

The coward in me didn’t want to go. It was uncomfortable and I didn’t want to see what he’d become. But I knew I had a responsibility. The reality was even more heartbreaking than I expected. The whole time I was there, he just sat in his chair. He was breathing oxygen through a mask. And while he was still technically capable of speech, it was only sparingly, and this wasn’t one of those times. Instead, his daughter and I talked. She informed me that he’d discovered Chick-fil-A’s Ice Dream cones and it was his new favorite thing. There wasn’t much else to say. I was only there about ten minutes, but before I left, he nudged his daughter and pointed towards me.

“Oh, he wanted you to have this.”

She handed me a twenty dollar bill. The amount of money I told him I’d paid for his groceries and medication. At first, I was confused and a little annoyed. Who cares?! It’s just twenty bucks! I’d already forgotten about it.

But then I realized, this wasn’t about me. Greg didn’t want to die having owed anyone. It was about his pride. I took it as a dying man’s last wish and said “thank you.”

A few days later, he was gone. To his word, there was no funeral. Even worse, the company we worked for didn’t even come to us to mention his passing. The man worked for them for thirty years and they didn’t give a damn.

By then, I’d been filling Greg’s job for over a month, but I still thought of it as his desk and left it as he had it. Unfortunately, Greg had always had his desk looking like a junkyard. He had alternators and random parts everywhere, as well as packets of sugar and ketchup and things like that. And beneath his desk sat a giant box filled with all manner of things, but mostly magazines. He had quite a few Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions.

My boss sadly informed me that it was probably time to clean up all of it. So I got a cart and loaded everything on it and brought it to the dumpster. On a fundamental level, it was all just a bunch of garbage. But symbolically, I couldn’t help but feel like I was throwing away all that was left of him in the world.

In amongst his things, he had this old knife. It wasn’t anything special. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t even sharp. But I kept it. So at least there was one piece of Greg left.

It’s been five years. I miss Greg. But I also take it as a lesson, not to live my life that way. I don’t want to push away others out of pride. I have no desire to fade away. And I certainly want more than an old knife to be my legacy.