My grandfather died on Saturday night. He was the last of my grandparents to die. Like his wife, my grandmother Evelyn, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. When Madeline was born Sarah and I intended to make our first trip with Madeline to visit him in Toronto so that he would get a chance to see his first great grand daughter before he died. Just last weekend Lisa, Dave, Mom, and Robert made a trip to Toronto with large size prints that Sarah had scrambled to print so that Eddie could see a picture of Madeline large enough to be visible through the haze of his macular degeneration. Had we heard about the visit to Toronto sooner we likely would have traveled along with everyone else. But we put off our trip for a week too long and so without knowing that death was coming so soon we missed the narrow window of opportunity for the generations to briefly meet.

Saturday, the day that he died, was also Sarah’s 30th birthday, a major milestone of itself. For my 30th birthday I gathered together a large group of friends, including Sarah, for a wild trip to Vegas. For Sarah’s 30th birthday we went out on Friday night to celebrate with her friends from college and my parents had gotten their first taste of babysitting Madeline. Then on Saturday Sarah and I were sick all day with the flu and/or hangovers and debated going out for a birthday celebration at the Falks’ house where Lisa had procured an ice cream birthday cake to commemorate the occasion. When we finally decided we couldn’t go out the group celebrating at the Falks gathered around the phone to sing Sarah a Happy Birthday. About an hour later my mother called to let me know that Eddie had died.

On Sunday Sarah and I walked through Brookline to Matt and Kate’s to watch the Patriots get trounced by the Chief’s. Tom Brady had a career high stat, 4 interceptions. On the way we bumped into Gadi from ImprovBoston and we stopped to chat about the baby, Thanksgiving, Arizona, Boston, whatever. It took about an hour and a half to walk down Harvard Avenue to Allston. We always seem to meet people in Coolidge Corner. It’s one of the reasons that Sarah and I don’t ever really want to leave the city to move to the suburbs. We love bumping into random people we know.

At night we watched Layer Cake, an ok movie along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The movie was mildly entertaining but what I was more than amazed by was that Madeline fell asleep on my chest with her face down. Her arms were wide around me holding me like she was trying to hug me but with such a small body I felt like underneath her I was her whole world and that she knew enough instinctively to enjoy embracing me. Although I should have moved her to the bassinet I preferred having her there on my chest because it was such a great feeling. Instead I asked Sarah to get some photographs of the event. I am not sure yet since it happened so recently but it will probably remain a major highlight in my memory.

I flew to Toronto on Monday morning on a small plane that made me a bit dizzy from the turbulence. Because we had been to Toronto less than a year ago for my grandmother’s funeral the chain of places and events were familiar this time. We were going to the same funeral home, the same grave site, and then see the same relatives and friends who were there to comfort us. It feels odd when a funeral becomes something familiar since death is such a singular event.

At the funeral I was the person with the six week old baby, the new hope and generation to contrast a sudden end of an older generation. People were congratulatory and interested in looking through the short stack of pictures of Madeline that I had quickly cut out from a printout on the ink jet printer at 4 am on my way to the flight. People had all heard that there was a great grand daughter that had just been born before his death. It made things at least a little more fair and mirrored the standard messages in the prayers for a funeral – Adonai giveth and Adonai taketh away or life is a journey and the journey itself is eternal even if the traveler is not.

This year has been a very major year for me. I lost my last grandparents, started a new job/company, got married, and had a baby. Those weren’t the exact list I had put down at New Years when one of the items that made my top ten list for annual to dos was to become a male exotic dancer and another was to appreciate Sarah more often. I didn’t actually go anywhere exotic like in prior years. This year all of the events occurred around me, some of which I could control and others where I was mainly a spectator. So I feel like an alien life tourist, inhabiting a human body for the period of one life, on a trip I bought in a sci-fi mall, to experience what it is like to be a human.

We looked through a number of pictures from older days. Some had the amazing look of being perfectly set in another era. One had the 1930s with young campers dressed in clothing from the Great Depression looking vaguely like the Little Rascals gang. Another picture showed great uncle Jack with a military uniform on and a rifle in his hand for World War II. He had been 26 but drafted for war anyways. The century has been a big one where at my grandfather’s birth the horse and carriage was commonplace and beginning to be replaced by the automobile. Now at his death I could take breaks from the relatives and friends to review my life by flying like Superman, through the satellite imagery of Google Earth first by looking from above at every address that I had ever lived and then to escapes to Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Grand Canyon, and Venice.