Dr. Lewis Huget Flach, DMD, died last Friday. He was 89 years old. He was my grandpa.
Grandpa Lewie was named after a friend of his father, Lewis A. MacArthur, and for his mother’s Huguenot surname. His last name, Flach, means “flatlander” in German. His ancestors left Strasbourg, then Stallupönen, then Pittsburgh, and ended up in Portland. He grew up in Alameda, spent war years as a boy in the Bay Area and Philadelphia, was deployed to Korea, lived for a while on Mt. Tabor, spent his latter years in Boring. He had four children, seven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
His father, Vic Senior, made maps. His brother, Vic Junior, taught art. Grandpa Lewie was a dentist.
The second-to-last time I saw Grandpa, I asked him what fields of science he liked most. What led him to dentistry? Was he more drawn to biology or chemistry? There are different sorts of science minds, I’ve learned, and I wanted to know because I look for familiar themes, to see if his passions would illuminate some of Lana’s.
“Nothing in particular,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t care about the academics. I wanted to work with my hands.”
I picture Grandpa’s hands.
I picture how, when we were small, he’d look at us with a quizzical tilt, peer down at our ears through his glasses, and ask, “What’s that behind your ear?” Then he’d reach out and brush behind them with precise and gentle fingers, and draw out a quarter, then give the coin over to us.
I picture how he’d whisk out a white handkerchief and how, in a few folds and knots, the cloth became a mouse, and the mouse would sit in the crook of his arm and he’d say, “I think I’ve got him settled down, so you can go ahead and pet him,” and we’d reach out, wary, knowing what might happen, yet when the mouse leapt to life and skittered down Grandpa’s forearm, we were always surprised.
I picture those hands as a boy, long before us, clutching at a dart thrown into his thigh by Uncle Vic, or grasping the pole of a trolley running up Northeast 33rd, or carving inappropriate shapes in the wood shop. I picture one of those hands holding the hand of his true love in the halls of Grant High School.
“This is gonna pinch a little,” he’d say, and I feel the hands jiggling my cheek to alleviate the jab of a syringe punching into my gums, flooding them with novocaine. I feel the satisfying sensation from when he pressed in fillings. I picture him pointing me to the prize drawers stuffed with bouncy balls and spider rings and Trident.
I picture the hands locking the office on Division Street. Or the one on Foster Road. I picture them ordering a drink at The Space Room. And filling a punchbowl with rainbow sherbet and Sprite. And squirrel-proofing the bird feeders.
I picture his hands going up under Grandma’s red Christmas sweater, her laughing, “Lewie!!!” and the rest of us feeling awkward, but not awful.
I picture the hands at the Kingdome, waving at Arthur Rhodes to autograph my mitt. I picture him handing me keys to an ‘86 Honda Accord. I picture his hands steering a rental car on desert roads west of Tombstone.
I picture him sitting down next to me, his hand pinching my thigh hard above the knee. I was older and tired of tickling, and the pinch hurt, so I snapped at him, Don’t do that! And he seemed hurt, not used to being shouted at by grandchildren. If he pinched me after that, he was gentle.
I was right to be a young man holding boundaries, establishing domains, but I was wrong not to know Grandpa’s hands were how he loved.
That first love holding Grandpa’s hands in the halls of Grant High was Grandma Joan.
She died a month after Mindy, so for almost eight years Grandpa and I had a different relationship than before: the kinship of widowers. Whenever we talked, we talked about mourning.
At first, we both wanted to build monuments. Mine would be a story, and his would be a sculpture. Both works were started, both are unfinished. We couldn’t fully conjure our loves in art. Not fully. Not yet.
Grandpa was bothered he wouldn’t finish the sculpture, and I told him a story I’d heard by Tolkien about an artist who sees a vision of a tree. He sets out to paint the tree and, over a lifetime, only ever finishes a single leaf. It’s not until later, after death, that the artist sees the tree truly, in person.
The last time I saw Grandpa was not far from where I last saw Grandma, in the hall of his bedroom. He’d stopped eating. He rose from bed and helped me navigate the light switches. His hands were clumsy and imprecise. I steadied him once with my arm, and I thought about how I’d steadied his brother, Vic, on a sidewalk in Laramie. I felt honored to support such beautiful men.
After the lights were aligned, we said goodbye and Grandpa hugged Lana and I. Then he hugged us each again. My grandpa, always lively and big, now small in my arms. But his hugs were still strong.
The day was coming. The day comes for us all.
Last Friday, a few moments into the first break of a writing seminar, my phone rang and the caller was Mom and I knew what the call would be as I answered.
Grandpa left only a few minutes before, and as he did, he held the hands of his daughters.
What a beautiful tribute to your grandpa, Jordan. May God be ever near as you journey with this new layer of grief.
karen’s dad. and to think all i knew of him was that he was a dentist. you have filled in the blanks and painted a beautiful picture of a man who loved and was loved back by generations. thanks, jordan.