my grandfather died on the most perfectly beautiful fall day. at least, it was beautiful in chicago – one of those heartbreakingly golden fall days, when the sky is blue and white clouds with grey underbellies race across it, the sunlight playing hopscotch with little rain squalls. on campus the grass was still lush and green from early fall rains, trees draped in color, not yet bare, dried leaves making that crunchyhappy underfoot noise, filling the nose with the dusty scent of something slipping out of your grasp. the air was cool and crisp and the sunlight warm, that clever dichotomy of temperatures that locates a sort of wordless, melancholy joy in the chest. an imperceptible breeze shook leaves out of their trees, drifting noiselessly toward the ground one or two at a time, like harbingers of the coming snow.

i imagine that in boise it probably rained that day. i picture a grey day and a cold drizzling rain, trees already bare, lifting their skeletal forms up to the sky in dark silhouette. i picture this because on the day that my grandfather left this world, a light went out somewhere. i imagine this cold fall day into being for my grandmother, because the times in my life when i have been truly overwhelmed with grief, i have wanted, needed even, the world to share my howling sadness, to be grey and damp and close.

to try to summarize his life here would only fall into cliche, and i’m no obit writer anyway. i am his legacy, myself and my brothers and cousins, our parents and our children and children-to-be. in all: two children, five grandchildren, three great grandchildren. a life’s work: more life. more branches. on october twenty-first, a single leaf let go of its branch in a breeze so soft the rest of us couldn’t perceive it. it was just time to let go and so he did, drifting slowly earthward, with grace.