Roland Dance

My grandfather just passed away last Friday, October 7th.   He would have turned 98 on the 25th of this month.

(That's me with my older brother and grandparents, in case you were wondering.)  I didn't grow up near family of any kind - the nearest cousins or grandparents were a 5 hour drive away.  So I knew my Grandma and Grandpa Dance mostly from when they would go on Square Dancing trips and stop by to visit us. 

But that changed once I went to college here at BYU.  My grandmother passed away just a couple of months before I moved to Utah, and Grandpa had a bit of an adjustment to make.  Not only on the practical end - he had never cooked in his life, and has honestly spent the last eleven years either eating out for every meal or eating at his children's houses - but also from losing his date.  That was the one part I could help with.  He has always had season tickets to Ballet West and the Opera, and loved going to shows and skiing and so forth.  And since I was the only person in my family out here, and he was alone as well, I became his go-to "date".

So I have a lot of memories of going out with him to the ballet.  When he learned that I had never gone skiing before (the official family pastime when he was raising my mother), he took me to Brighton and paid for an instructor and my lift tickets.  He went skiing that day too, in fact - even at 88 years old, he headed right for the tougher slopes.  I also spent a lot of time camping out at his house too.  I would always spend the night there before I went to the airport, and I spent weeks at a time living at his house for the Olympics and my jaw surgery.  I even moved in for the entire month before I got married. 

My husband has often said that he felt like he stole me from my Grandpa a bit.  And I'll admit it - he will always have a very special place in my heart.  He was a truly kind and generous person, and was amazingly loyal, whether to family, a golf course or restaurant he would go to, or to people he worked with.  In fact, he was working all the up until he died.  His younger brother had Alzeimer's, and it seemed Grandpa could not imagine a worse fate.  He was sure that if he stopped going to work, that would set in for him too.  So he never stopped going.  He worked as a restaurant supply salesman, and the kind company he worked for kept his desk for him through all of his hospital stays.  He had friends that would enter all of his orders into the computer for him, since he never learned how to use such a thing, and when he couldn't drive anymore there would always be someone willing to drive him home on their lunch break.  He worked there for 55 years.

It's always the little stories that get you, though.  Like how he was always so practical that he didn't like things to go to waste.  If there was leftover food on his plate, he would ask each and every person at the table if they wanted it.  And he didn't really like new objects, so shopping for him was rather difficult.  My mom would buy him new shirts, and he would keep on wearing the old ones with stains on them.  He read books constantly, but only borrowed them from the library.  So once he was done with a book, he would try and pass it on so someone else could enjoy it.  And Christopher and I will always laugh about the year that he tried to pass on a loaf of banana bread someone had given him for Christmas - at the very Christmas party he opened it.  He knew he wouldn't eat it at home, since he always went out to eat, and was quite sure that we should take it home with us instead.  He didn't mean to be rude to the people who gave it to him: he just couldn't see around the practical side that he wouldn't eat it, and someone should.

My Grandpa was suprisingly agile for someone his age.  He took me skiing another time before he finally had to give that up, and was always quite critical of walkers or canes.  In fact, he objected to moving to the retirement home because he didn't want to get stuck with all the "old people".  He just never saw himself as old - despite being older than most of the people there.  The people he loved spending time with was his family.  He had four children, fourteen grandchildren, and quite a number of great-grandchildren.

Hearing that he passed on was a bit of a suprise, as he has been doing really well lately.  There were a few times in the last year when the doctors thought that the pnemonia would take him, but he would just bounce back and get right back to working every day and golfing every Saturday.  But in the end, he had a wonderful, long and healthy life.  I'm really going to miss him.  I'll miss taking him to the Christmas Around the World show at BYU, which he looked forward to every year and never stopped talking about.  I'll miss him asking my husband what he did for a living, since he could never quite grasp the idea of selling internet security.  And mostly, I'll miss what a sweet and kind man he was. 

Grandpa's Obituary