William Matthew Sima, 1939-2019

“In Memoriam: My Grandfather”

Like I mentioned at the end of last week’s blog, my grandfather, William Sima, passed away on September 16th, 2019. Having been born on November 11th, 1939, he was 79 years old. He was my father’s father, and my grandfather. And I miss him.

I don’t handle grief well, all things considered. I have a hard time processing it in a way that I can understand. Or, rather, I process it in a way that opts for two distinct outcomes; one, I either feel the grief, or two, I compartmentalize it and store it away somewhere at the back of my brain for later perusal. The latter outcome is, of course, not particularly healthy. But I’m also not quite sure how else to process grief, so that’s what I tend to do. I don’t like emotions very much, so grief and distress are hard for me.

It’s also hard to process emotions when I feel so distant from the event, even one as impactful as the death of a family member. At the time of my grandfather’s death, and actually at the time of this writing, I’m about two and a half hours from home. I’ve bombarded by schoolwork, housework, and work-work, and the emotional strain feels distant and far away. Which, honestly, makes it all the more difficult to process the emotions I’m feeling since I feel so removed from everything. Like it isn’t quite real. I’m not sure if it’s entirely sunk in yet that he’s actually dead.

So if this whole post feels rather disjointed, cyclical, or broken up, it’s because I don’t really know what to feel. I don’t know what to think about this all yet. Emotions are hard and death is weird. I feel guilty for not being there when he passed. I feel guilty for not feeling more than I do. And I feel guilty for not getting a chance to say goodbye. These are all things that I’ll have to live with, I guess. He isn’t having a funeral. He never wanted one. But I imagine we’ll be spreading his ashes at the back of his property, the same place where (I believe) we spread the ashes of his mother.

I’d say that I should cut this out and that this article isn’t about me, and it isn’t, but funerals are for the living, not the dead. The process of grief is a trait that is uniquely active and dynamic, unlike the dead, which are static and unchanging. At least in my mind. So, if you ask me, funerals, eulogies, services, obituaries, memorials, everything of that nature are as much about the living as the dead. They’re a part of the grieving process. Or, at least, a sort of communion between the living and the dead. A blurring of lines, a ritual purification. Where the relationships that the living had with the dead are almost as important as the dead themselves.

I don’t want to talk about that any more. At the end of the day, all that we really keep from those that have passed are memories. So I want to share some memories of my grandfather, here, and give some sort of insight into the kind of man that I knew him to be. Into why I’ll miss him.

First off, I want to relate how he died, because I personally think it’s important to know how people died. The act of dying can give you as much insight into someone’s life as the act of living, sometimes. This might not be one of those times. But William Sima, or Grandpa Sima as I knew him, died of complications following a surgery to remove a massive tumor from his bladder. It was more complicated than that; he’d had COPD, a chronic lung illness, for a long time, and had been in the hospital and treatment centers for almost two months before he passed. At one point, he couldn’t expel the carbon dioxide from his lungs and ended up hallucinating, which is what got him admitted in the first place. It got better, for a time. But then they found the tumor, and it had to be removed because it was causing him extreme pain. So they put him under for surgery, and he didn’t regain consciousness. He didn’t want to put on extensive life support, so we pulled the tube, so to speak. And he hung on for 27 hours before finally drawing his last breath. That, at least, can give you a bit of insight; the man was a fighter.

He was a fighter, for sure, and he was strong. He was a handyman, seemingly able to fix and build anything he needed to, from cars to tractors to home improvements to appliances and everything in between. He worked for Nicor as a gasman for pretty much his entire career, and met Dennis DeYoung’s producer while on call at one point. He and his father built the brick house on Cermak that my parents brought me home to when I was born. I spent the first five years of my life in that house, the one that he had built.

For my entire life, and most of the years before, he lived on a wooded tract of land near a local forest preserve. He had a huge yard, a huge garden, a small barn that he used to keep poultry in, and a pretty extensive grove of trees behind all of this in which he kept a garage that had old cars he was working on, and an actual outhouse. The whole property was studded with stone altars holding gas lamps, various farming equipment and metal implements that I didn’t and still don’t understand, a tractor or two, patios and stone walls that he probably built, wooden decorations presumably carved by chainsaw, and more. I remember being entranced by his house as a kid. There seemed to be so many wild things there that I’d never seen before. It was what I imagined a real farmhouse was like. And to a certain extent, it was probably a pretty accurate representation, especially since my grandfather did raise livestock at one point. On a small scale, anyway.

We used to plant pumpkins in the garden in his backyard, and when my brother and I were younger, my dad would take us over to his house to check on our plants. Throughout the summer, my brother and I would watch the pumpkins grow while playing in the old chicken coop and running with the dogs he had, as well as hiking around the woods behind his place. The pumpkin vines would get absolutely massive and extend far beyond their patch, and pumpkins tend to do. My brother and I were always thrilled with it.

I remember at one point he had an egg incubator, for chicken eggs and the like, and I’m pretty sure he raised chickens in the atrium in his house. I remember that solar room always being full of other farming tools and other various odds and ends that he’d no doubt acquired over the years. I think we brought quail eggs to him at one point, and he tried to incubate those, too. The house always smelled off sweet tobacco, like Black and Milds or Swishers. Those are probably what did him in, but I’ve come to associate that smell with his house. It’s the only scent of smoking that I actually like. Looking back now, I wish I’d spent more time at his house, to appreciate the decor. But more than that I wish I’d spent more time with him.

He isn’t a smiley man, at least in photos. But whenever he’d see one of his grandkids, like myself or my brother and our six cousins, he’d break into a grin. As my brother pointed out to me, every time he saw us, he’d give us a big hug, pat us on the back, and saw, “How you doin’, guy?” or something along those lines. I never realized it until after he was gone, but I can still hear his voice when I think about it.

That was another thing. Grandpa Sima may have sometimes come off as distant or grumpy to those around him, and no doubt he preferred his solitude, but he really loved his grandkids. That is, he loved me, and my brother, and our cousins. Of that much, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind. He absolutely doted on us all, and did his absolute best to provide the world to us. He regularly gave us gifts, usually in the form of birthday presents wrapped in the Sunday newspaper (because that’s when they printed in color ink) or cash in simple bank envelopes, but the gifts were never just gifts. They meant more to him than just money or clothes. He wanted to make us happy. Looking back now, it was never what was in the envelope that mattered. It was the fact that he brought gifts to us at all that mattered. He cared, and he showed it in the way he knew best. And I think I know why.

Grandpa Sima struggled with depression for much of his adult life, very much like I’ve talked about in the past, with my own struggles. That’s why, last week, I called him a kindred spirit as much as a grandfather. I didn’t realize this until I went through my own bouts of depression, but Grandpa understood. He knew what it meant to feel these things, to struggle in that black abyss of inner agony. So in my own dark days, when he asked me how I was doing, it was more than just a simple exchange of pleasantries. Much of his communication, I believe, was unspoken.

He grew up in a different time, in an age when showing emotion, especially for a family man, was a sign of weakness. The 20th century was not kind to mental illness, and the “strong, silent type” was a hugely popular trope in media for much of my grandfather’s formative years. It still is, I guess. Now, I don’t want to analyze and prescribe a reason to explain why my grandfather was the way he was. It isn’t my place. But I know that he was often quiet, didn’t show affection, and preferred to keep to himself. Which is why his actions meant so much more when he did them.

If his thought process was anything like mine, and the older I get the more I start to think it was, he gave us such straightforward gifts and asked us about how we were doing so vaguely because he didn’t like emotion. But the why, of course, isn’t nearly as important as the fact that he did show emotion, in his stone-faced way. He cared deeply for all his grandkids, and it wasn’t until I had gone through depression and known that he had, too, that I felt the depth of his actions. That I understood that what he did and said wasn’t just surface level gifts or obligatory words. It was how he could show affection. And the “how you doin’, guy?”, especially after my initial depression, wasn’t just “how you doin’?” At that point, I realized we were more alike than I thought, and I like to think he realized that, too. After that, we had a deeper bond. We were kindred spirits, then. I wish I had developed it further.

That’s what this is going to come down to, I think. I wish I had spent more time with him. And I have nothing to blame for that but my own apathy, I guess. Maybe apathy is the wrong word. But the idea is there. I should have gone out of my way to see him more often, if I really wanted to develop that relationship further. But I didn’t. And I think I’ll be kicking myself for that for a while, I think we all will be. And I think I’ll be kicking myself about that every time a family member dies. There’s no remedy for that, besides seeing people more often. You never really know how much time is left.

Death is complicated. The grieving process is a weird, ugly mixture of nostalgia, longing, guilt, sadness, numbness, anger, confusion, disappointment, denial, emptiness, and a whole other host of emotions that I have a hard time ascribing words to. Eventually acceptance comes along. Writing about death and memory is weird when you’re still kind of in the process, so if this article seems like it’s going in circles, sorry about that. It’s a first draft and written while I’m emotionally charged. But also, I’m not really sorry.

Like I said, I don’t know what to say when it comes to grief. I’m never quite sure what to do, or how to treat it. Usually, I just tell stories. So before I go, I want to relate a couple others. Like, for example, one of my favorite things about Grandpa was that he printed out memes to keep in his wallet. Yes, he had pictures of his kids and grandkids, too, but he also had memes. And these memes had to do, in recent years, with Donald Trump. Now, it may not surprise you to learn that I’m not a huge fan of the orange-skinned babyman that is President of the United States, but my grandfather held no love for the man, either. While cleaning out his house after his passing, my cousin Stephanie sent all us cousins this snapchat:

He liked to sometimes pull these memes out of his wallet to show them us when he came over for dinner, usually at about the same time he gave us copies of Popular Science or Family Handyman that he got in the mail. Or, it was after he’d given my mom his copy of People Magazine, and after they’d discussed the recent celebrity drama or the news of the entertainment industry. One time he gave me some pictures that either he or his friend had taken of the space shuttle when it was being transported around the country. That was another thing about him. He really liked science. I always liked talking to him about what was going on in the science world, in astronomy and environmental science and the like. He liked building, and he liked science in a civilian way. And at the core of them, they aren’t really that different of disciplines.

He also drove a Ford Thunderbird. For his last few years, he bought himself a fancy old car that he’d always wanted, and he kept it in perfect condition. He drove it around when he felt like letting the wind run through his grayed hair, and he was very proud of that car. He was proud of all his cars, really. They’re all in pretty damn good shape for being as old as they are.

There’s a lot that I’m missing. Like the time that he went down the waterslide at our local pool and couldn’t find the bottom of the pool in three feet of water, so the lifeguards had to wade over to him and help him out. I think the lifeguards got a shoutout in the local newspaper for that one. Or there’s his collection of Santa Claus statues in his basement. Including black Santa. So there’s that.

I’ll never be able to really capture the essence of someone in a 2,000 word post on an amateur writer’s blog, especially since I’m writing this at 10pm the night before with a headcold and looming paperwork. But I’ve done my best to try and relate to you about a man who loved his family with all his heart, especially his grandkids. I’ve tried to tell you about a man who was quiet, yet always meant what he said. His actions carried meaning. He was interesting to talk to. He loved dogs. He loved birds. He loved building. He loved us. I miss him a lot, I’m going to miss him a lot. It’s gonna be weird to not see him at future family events ever again. It’s gonna be weird when the Forest Preserve tears down his house and there’s nothing left but memories. It’s gonna be weird when, eventually, the rest of us die, too. But that’s life, I guess. Life is weird.

I love you, Grandpa. I’ll miss you.