To my underdeveloped seven-year-old mind, the sunken, rounded divots in my grandpa’s face from meteors of cancer that struck him two years earlier blistered an image into my head as fast as hot ash from a bonfire landing on an open toe. At my grandparents’ house, the hospice bed filled the center of the living room, the room where we used to role play Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood. This time Grandpa was not acting, nor the story funny. His streamlined position, like a scuba diver gliding over weaving growths of untouchable coral, was like that of Sleeping Beauty’s rest, but somehow, I didn’t think that any fairytale ending danced into the dreams of my grandpa’s future. Rather, slowly itching nearer, sickness floated over my grandpa’s eyes like the innumerable dust particles sparkling in the window’s light, and his blinking eye lids, his only active defense against the pull of the grave, forced death to subside once again. Awake now, yes, but not for much longer.

At my young age, I wished for my grandpa to come over to my house on Saturdays again, to pretend he was a dog with the intent to attack my brother and me. After pulling on layer after layer of sweatpants, socks, boots, coats, hats, gloves, snow pants, we dramatized every one of Grandpa’s attacks, and when he tried to take off a pair of gloves or a hat, we flailed about and laughed together like inexperienced actors; there was so much laughing. Now, the silence in my grandpa’s house consumed every attempted word of those surrounding him, every breath of my family, leaving my grandmother and mom gasping for oxygen between the rivers trickling down the hills of their cheeks.

Then my mother asked me the question.

“Honey, do you want to talk to your Grandpa Neis?”

Well, that was easy. No, I didn’t want to talk to the immobile statue, incapable of laughter, unable to respond, but able to listen. I had no words, I could not stretch out my hand to his, and producing any meagre gesture to my dying grandfather seemed impossible. I was listening to an audio book on my CD player, curled in the tightest ball on the couch in the opposite corner of the room, yards away from my changed grandpa in the hospice bed. A Junie B. Jones story spilled from my headphones, engulfing my flickering eyes, preventing any glance towards the death-bed. I intently drew a spiral on the edge of my notebook; the pattern distracted me from the world above the page. My brother, the brave eleven-year-old, rambled his thoughts to my grandpa, rolled them out like the red carpet before the Oscars to present the best possible outcome after my grandpa’s imminent death. Austin, the talker. He explained to my statue grandpa his idea of heaven, with rolling green fields that mirrored the hills of Ireland, animals that sounded through the everlasting pristine morning air, banquet food set out by God himself, inviting all angels to join his endless table. I turned up the volume on my headphones.

***
In the floating years before the mangling cancer settled on the suppliant bones in my grandpa’s body, on a bright summer’s day after Sunday mass, I excitedly thrust my new mini notebook, covered in a black and white cheetah print shiny binding with a snap button in the front, at my grandpa.

“Will you write me a note Grandpa?”

With his coffee mug secure on a table settled under a waterfall of bursting flowers, Grandpa flipped to the back page, and penned evenly in all caps, “GRANDPA LOVES YOU.” The words rang from the ice white page, as clear as his deep bass voice that sang the music of the tuba. His simple words; they created the first note, the first authored feelings, the first written connection between us. His words, alone in the notebook, built my own heaven.

***
At his grave-site, after they gently lowered my grandpa into his final bed, my parents told me that it was time to leave. Leave? Leave Grandpa alone in the sweltering July sun, surrounded by etched gray stones that littered the holy ground around his grave? I screamed to stay with him, dressed in my coveted yellow flowered dress with new white strappy sandals, stretching out my arm towards Grandpa as my father carried me away like a struggling puppy. My grandma recognized my juvenile depression, and as consolation, granted me an object I remember from the sunny days of summer: one of his hats. What was I going to do with a man’s ratty straw hat that resembled a low-hanging flower eaten by the blades of the lawn mower? At least I received a part of him: the rest of his wise words, stomach-convulsing jokes, and witty comebacks disappeared.

At first I took a hammer, pounding a nail through the straw hat into my bedroom wall. However, seeing the hat droop down, hanging onto life as Jesus did on his own nails, well, the sight overwhelmed me, so I placed the sacred hat upside down on my tallest dresser. Looking from my own bed in the corner of my room, the centered hat lay open, raised higher than anything in my room, save the crucifix on top of my window. Open, I realized, to my thoughts, asking to receive my words just as I asked my grandpa for his in the warm months before. As my hands shook faster than a hummingbird’s wings, I hastily wrote a short letter on a thin pink sticky-note, stuck the ends together, and threw it in the hat as if a ghost would fly out faster than Atalanta and haunt my dreams with my words.

I talked to my grandpa. Through a hat. On a sticky note. But still, I spoke to him, through a connection I envisioned like the darkened confessionals at church, releasing my tension and finally allowing me to burst out into fresh, cleansed air. I refused to speak to my grandpa confined to his bed, the last chance to speak real words to the man who created a fairytale world out of my childhood. But because of his hat, an object that occupied my attentions each night before rest settled over my eyes, I gained the ability to speak with him once again, to recover the words locked up in my seven-year-old self.

I write letters to a dead man. I know how insane I sound, clearly my reason for refusing to tell anyone, ever. Each month I write one note in a mini composition notebook that settles in the inviting opening of the hat. Objectively, I realize that the notes do not travel through the Jesus post office and fly up to my grandpa’s apartment in heaven, but I like to wring the idea of Grandpa reading my words, my unsaid words finally coming out. The notebook is a sort of diary, scrawled in blue and black pen with gratitude.

The living, breathing hat soaks up my long-awaited words, words that rest on a small mound of items. Squished into the scooping opening, a beautiful ornament of silver and golden gems sits heart-shaped as the image of angel wings. Wings of my grandfather, wings he possesses now. His Christmas-red beaded rosary snuggles under the arched wings, a gift to connect his prayers with mine. And nestled in the very bottom, singed in a glittery bag resembling Santa’s pack, rests the best gift—a small mini notebook covered in a black and white cheetah print shiny binding snapped closed, holding the most precious words of all.