The lamp was on in the living room and Grandma was sitting with the dog beneath her. I was thinking about what Grandpa said in the hospital and couldn\u2019t sleep:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I died,\u201d Grandpa said, \u201cI was sitting with my back against a tree. I heard drumming, shouting, metal clashing, shields thudding. I looked up and saw Valhalla through the tangled arches of tree limbs. I climbed through the branches and I saw this battle. I thought of home and I hesitated. I could have entered. I put my foot down to leave the tree top behind and I woke up in the hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grandma kept braided locks of Grandpa\u2019s hair from their wedding night:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, Grandpa was a kickboxer and this was his warrior braid. He said when he married the woman of his dreams he was going to cut his braid. Grandpa cut his braid at our wedding ceremony,\u201d she said. \u201cYou want to know more about your peculiar Grandpa. Why he had DNR tattooed over his heart. Maybe he was carried away, but he felt, depending on how he died, he would go to Valhalla. Maybe he did. The EMT did not take the DNR tattoo seriously when Grandpa died in the ambulance. Grandpa was resuscitated and he was upset about it. He retired undefeated as a kickboxer. Being resuscitated, he felt, was his first defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grandpa lived for three miserable days before he died again. He was not resuscitated a second time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t make the climb up into the ambulance,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cI had to follow in my car. I forgot to tell them he didn\u2019t want to be brought back. It breaks my heart that he believed being resuscitated kept him from Valhalla.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe it did,\u201d I said. \u201cBut he beat death once. That\u2019s pretty Viking.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you remember Grandpa\u2019s coach?\u201d she said. \u201cHe was old when you were a kid but he came to a few cookouts. He used to say \u2018If happiness is a journey then death is just a destination.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo we believe in Valhalla?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes and no,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cI don\u2019t believe, really. But you were there. You saw how much he believed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDid he believe before he was sick?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cSince he was sick, he started to lean into this warrior-religion stuff, but as long as I\u2019ve known him, he was a lapsed Catholic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow could Grandpa be happy beating on people?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike death, the violence was just where the thing ended,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cYour grandpa loved the training, the starving, the heat, the cold, the purpose. I know his least favorite part was the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen why Valhalla?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometime in his training, before he met me, he lapsed. He didn\u2019t believe that soldiers, fighters, were innocent. He thought they needed their own place to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m never going to know him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the man he was fighting ever lost consciousness, Grandpa wouldn\u2019t celebrate. He\u2019d grab and lift their feet to get the blood back to their head.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cLike death, the violence was just where the thing ended,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cYour grandpa loved the training, the starving, the heat, the cold, the purpose. I know his least favorite part was the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3328,1340,3329,2048],"class_list":["post-19204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fighting","tag-flash","tag-valhalla","tag-viking","writer-michael-hammerle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19814,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19204\/revisions\/19814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}