After that little confrontation, I still didn't believe my mom like I probably should've. I still underestimated myself in every way possible. While I did my school work, I worked on it very slowly, paranoid about every possible mistake I may or may not have made. The nice thing about Homebound was that school fit into my own schedule rather than the other way around, so I could work on homework whenever I liked. Sometimes, I'd work on it as soon as I got home from school. Sometimes, I'd work on it as soon as I got home from school, pause it, then resumed it later. And sometimes, I'd work on it late at night. 

My teacher told me that if I ever felt myself getting stressed out over my work, or the answer to a problem wasn't coming to me as quickly as I wanted it to, I could pause my work and take a break. I used this strategy often, especially as the work got progressively more complex, and my grades proved to me that the strategy helped me out a lot. Sometimes, the answer to a question would come to me out of nowhere, and other times, I'd have to wrestle with the question a little more until I found an answer I was satisfied with.

Unfortunately, as the month of May came to a close, my grandpa Bob passed away. His unexpected passing forced me to stop working on school completely for at least a week, while I attended his funeral and regrouped. 

Because it was so sudden, I struggled to get a plane ticket to Minneapolis, and then a driver to take me to Lake City, and hour and a half southeast of Minneapolis. But, my mom offered to take me, which came as a huge surprise since my mom always talked about how much she hated Minnesota and would never go there again. She loved my dad's family, but did not like the overall climate of southeast Minnesota, or the culture. 

My dad told me I wasn't obligated to come to Minnesota, and if I did, I'd have to be around my stepmom and her side of the family. However, I told him that we all needed to swallow our pride for once, and I needed to say my goodbyes. Nothing was gonna stop me from attending my grandpa's funeral, especially since everyone else in my family begged me to go and even assigned me as a casket bearer. My dad finally agreed, and told me he'd meet me at the farm a couple days before the funeral. 

At 3 AM on a Tuesday morning, after getting no sleep, my mom and I left for the airport. By 5:00 AM, we were 30,000 feet in the air, headed northeast for Minneapolis. I slept on the plane, hoping to catch an hour of sleep before guiding my mom on the journey to the farm. She hadn't been there for over 15 years. However, my attempts to sleep on the plane failed, and as soon as we got off the plane, I made a bee-line for the nearest airport store to get myself a large Coke. 

My mom drove our little rental car slowly down the wet highway as heavy sheets of rain lashed at the windshield. We were one of the few cars on that stretch of highway, and I watched through the window as we passed by lush woods, thick green pastures, and acres of freshly plowed cropland that extended over rolling hills for as far as the eye could see. 

We turned off the highway after over an hour of driving, and I was agitated by how slow my mom was driving on the white gravel country roads. I was used to my dad's driving, which was actually quite dangerous. My mom was in no mood to drift and skid around those country roads like my dad often did, so I eventually gave up encouraging her to go faster, and let her drive below the 20 mile-per-hour speed limit. 

We passed through a little town called Oak Center, and then followed the road for the final mile, before turning into my grandma's driveway. The weathered victorian farmhouse still looked the same as it always did, and as we slowly drove up the gravel drive, about 20 mangy barn cats scattered in front of us in all directions, which startled my mom. In the pasture beyond the granary, black angus-holstein cattle grazed alongside their newborn calves, and beyond that were more acres of freshly plowed and planted cropland. Everything on that farm was just how it always been, yet it felt so different; so empty. 

My mom parked the car in the shadow of the granary where most of the barn cats ran to hide from us, and then together we slowly walked up the concrete steps and into the side-door of grandma's house, which opened up into the kitchen. There, my grandma Shirley stood at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes. When I came in there, she immediately looked up, smiled and embraced me. 

"I'm so glad you came!" she said in her thick midwestern accent, "I bet you're hungry!"

"I always am, grandma!" I smiled. 

"Good! I suppose your mom's hungry too!" grandma said as she hugged my mom.

"I am." my mom smiled. 

While my mom and grandma briefly caught up, I walked around the house just to check things out. Almost everything was the same, though it was eerily quiet without the TV or the radio blaring at nearly full volume. I startled when I walked into the living room and saw grandpa's empty wheelchair parked in his usual spot in front of the TV. Immediately, I felt a lump form in my throat, and struggled to choke back tears. Suddenly, the reality of my grandpa's passing hit me. It was something I had never felt before. I felt a searing physical pain wash through my body as tears welled up in my eyes. I quickly swallowed, and wiped the tears away from my eyes as I turned around to head back to the kitchen.

I paused in the main room, where grandma had a handful of open photo albums on the main dining table and on top of the antique cast iron stove. She sorted them out so they were in chronological order, from her and my grandpa's childhoods, to the last pictures of them they ever got taken. I started thumbing through the oldest photo album, which had pictures of my grandparents when they were kids. There weren't many pictures of them before their high school days, so after only a couple of pages, I came across my grandparents' wedding photos, a few of which were colorized. My grandpa towered over my grandma in those pictures, and they were both overjoyed about the marriage.

My mom and grandma joined me in the main room, where my grandma's cheery energy perked me up as well. She excitedly continued to catch up with my mom, while also showing her the photo albums. My grandma told stories about her life with my grandpa, starting with the day they met, and continuing up until his final day. In fact, my mom and I sat with my grandma at the dining table for two hours, listening to her talk about my grandpa. 

I thought I knew my grandpa Bob well before I read his obituary and listened to my grandma Shirley talk about him. But the more I listened, the less I realized I actually knew about my grandpa. Truth is, I never knew my grandpa Bob outside of his wheelchair. He was disabled long before I was born, and by the time I came along, his condition had deteriorated considerably since he suffered the brain aneurysm that took away his able body when he was 40 years old. 

Before his brain aneurysm, my grandpa was a very active man. He loved to hunt and was a lifetime board member of the local sportsmen's club. He grew hundreds of acres of crops, raised hundreds of Hereford cattle, and still found time to create a family and spend quality time with them, all the while battling a handful of minor health conditions. My grandpa Bob, for reasons I don't know, didn't have the ability to sweat. He struggled to regulate his body temperature not just in the heat, but in the cold as well. So, for a few winters, he and the family would move to a suburban house in Arizona, while the Minnesota farm froze under a blanket of heavy snow for several months out of the year.

In 1983 or 1984, after having three boys and one girl, my grandpa suffered sudden, stroke-like symptoms which landed him in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, about a half-hour's drive from the farm. To save his life, doctors had to remove a considerable amount of his brain, taking away my grandpa's ability to walk without help, talk without slurring his speech, or hold spoons and pens without severely shaky hands. My dad was only 5 or 6 years old when my grandpa Bob suffered such a cruel blow in life, so he grew up going to frequent doctors' appointments and watching as his dad struggled to take care of his own basic needs. 

My grandpa refused outside help, as did my grandma. Aside from going to the hospital for frequent check-ups and physical therapy, my grandma Shirley was my grandpa's only caretaker. Meanwhile, my uncle Wade took over the farm with the help of my uncle Wes, while my aunt Stacey went to Minneapolis with her fiance to start a family of her own, and my dad took the bus to and from school everyday. 

My grandpa Bob was very stoic and refused to show much emotion towards his condition. He relied on comedy to lighten the mood during the hardest times, and his stubborn nature always ensured that he'd come home and recover from every bout of illness he was challenged with. Because of this, my dad grew up emotionally immune to most medical emergencies, which is why he coped so well when I came into the world. 

But, that's also what made my grandpa's passing so much more shocking to us. My grandpa refused to give up, even when the odds were strongly stacked against him. He had many close calls with death before. A few times, he was so sick that my dad and I packed in my dad's little white Subaru, and drove across the Great Plains during the height of tornado season to visit grandpa in the hospital. I remember walking down those white-tiled ICU walls all too well, squeezing my dad's hand as we rounded a corner to my grandpa's room, unsure of what we would find. As cheery as he and my grandma would be, my grandpa would be unable to talk to us. Every time he ended up in the hospital with Pneumonia or something similar, he'd get a tracheostomy to help him breathe. While that made his recovery much quicker, the tracheostomy would be placed below my grandpa's vocal chords, stealing all of the air away from them, and thus robbing my grandpa of the ability to speak. 

As painful as those memories are, my grandpa always came home from the hospital and resumed life as usual. The last time I saw him, he was at home, active as always. My grandpa loved old country western music, especially if it was gospel music. In fact, the very last hour I saw him alive, he was watching the Grand Ole Opry on TV, where all they sang was bluegrass gospel music. If only I knew that was the last time I'd ever see my grandpa Bob alive again.