A tale of remembrance

I lost my grandfather this week.

He was the greatest storyteller I knew. Stories, I believe, are how memories keep alive even after no one is there to remember, so today I want to tell a few of my favorite stories about my grandfather.

This is how I remember him.

José was one of many sons born of the union of a feisty woman (there is a story about how she was captured and raised by native indigenous people, but that is for another time) and a hardworking man who loved his smoking pipe. Having grown up in the rough countryside of Minas Gerais, he found work on a farm in his early twenties. The farmer was a Portuguese immigrant who had his share of numerous children with a tiny, tough blue-eyed lady. One day, José fell in love with the second oldest daughter of his boss, the beautiful and electric Helena. The farmer mightily disapproved of their mixed-race union, so José and Helena fled to the big city to start anew. They built their life from scratch. They had many children; life would take away two of them. José became Seu Zé, a legend of his own making.

Seu Zé was a bartender, and later bar owner, for decades, so you may imagine where the penchant for telling fantabulous stories started. Many times, while we were growing up, we heard tales of his legendary arm-wrestling skills. He even claimed to once having won a championship, trophy and all - trophy none of us ever laid eyes upon. But I believed him; if anyone was strong enough to outwit any competitor, it was him. Up until his seventies, he was the physically strongest man I ever met, built like a giant to my child eyes. Then came the heart attack. He was so nonchalant about it; I recall the nurses laughing at the jokes he would crack and the things a man who just came straight from a surgery room should not be able to do. It felt like he was unbeatable.

It felt like that for long years.

One of the greatest quirks of Seu Zé were his lies. The man was a terrific liar. He would create these elaborate yet harmless lies and stick to them with passion. Anyone who had ever met him heard at least one and laughed it off more than once. My favorites, though, were the airplanes. Whenever an airplane crossed the sky, he would clock it in no time and remark: “That one is going to [name a city]”. One would ask him how could he know, to what he would say he “simply could tell”. I loved how his eyes clouded every time, how he talked about all these places he’d never been to with such familiarity. My grandfather haven’t traveled much. Whenever I visited a new city I made a point of picking a souvenir for him. He cherished them all; he had so much pride in telling everyone the places we, his kin, had been to. How far his name had traveled.

His name, better yet his last name, wasn’t really his last name. Legend goes that when my great grandfather went to the notary’s office to name his newborn son, he chose the surname of a fellow worker that he thought sounded nice. It turned into my grandfather’s middle name, but he passed it on as a surname to his children, who passed it on to their children. Now we are all part of this singular thing, this family that was born when José was born, that kept living and growing even after he turned into Seu Zé, Vô Panta, biso.

Grief, I heard, is love that persists.

I believe that too.

-Maíra