The last time I saw Papaw he was in a canvas sling hovering over a VA hospital bed. They were in the process of moving him to another room, someplace quieter, the same way animals go to die. His cheeks had sunken in, and his teeth were pushed out from under his lips. He’d stopped eating. Visiting him, I was much heavier than the previous year. It hung off my belly, chest, and back; a fifty-pound monkey I carried wherever I went.
In the past, Papaw never failed to remind me, his only grandson, “The first exercise you need to learn is to push yourself away from the table.” He was a man’s man: sports, chasing women, fixing stuff, and cussing at stuff he couldn’t fix. I was the quiet artistic type, writing songs about girls on my guitar alone in my room. The only exercise I ever did was help Mom carry in groceries and speed walk to the fridge for midnight snacks.
The one thing Papaw and I had in common was our breasts. His, sagging from age. Mine, ever since puberty. The doctors didn’t know exactly where mine came from, calling it pseudo-gynecomastia. Eat right and exercise were their magic prescriptions. I dreaded summertime the most when all my flat-chested friends with their chiseled bodies were by the pool working on a tan. I wore t-shirts, keeping only my head above the water’s surface. The one time I did come out in front of everyone, my best friend’s girlfriend said, “Geezus, yours are bigger than mine.”
Like Papaw in his final weeks, I also went through a phase of not eating, starving myself down until I looked like a walking skin doll. But no matter how much I lost, they were both still hanging there like parasitic twins. It wasn’t until I reached this state that he stopped commenting and started to worry.
I took his shaky outstretched hand when the hospital gown started to slip and covered him. His glassy brown eyes gazing back at me. “You look good, kid.” We’d finally caught a glimpse of each other’s reflection in the same mirror before he made his exit. I continue to wear the compression shirts, the slimming black button-ups (I do miss the 90’s when everyone wore layers). The concept of being fine the way I am are the clothes I constantly struggle to fit in.
When my son was born, everyone commented on how much he looked like me. Even to this day they say how perfectly he wears the family uniform. And I hope that’s the extent of the metaphor, as I look at the photo on my wall of Papaw at his forty-year regiment reunion. Standing tall in his ironed dress blues, bulging slightly from their gold buttons, bronze and silver medals crossing east to west over his body, shining in the camera flash.
