Sending off Grandpa

Al Aloia, 1930-2025. Husband, father, grandpa. Fisherman, bowler, cribbage player. Catholic lector. US Marine. One man, one life that touched many.

No matter how prepared you may be, the finality of death hits you with waves of grief, and the timing won’t always make sense. My grandpa died last week on Thursday. I learned mid morning bike ride when my phone rang and my mom’s name appeared. I didn’t cry. I made sure to ask how she was doing. I proceeded to buy the baguettes for which I was en route. I got home and showered and caught the shuttle, and then came the first rounds of tears. When I made it to the office, I tried to work, but soon the logistics of the moment overtook me. I grabbed a call room and furiously sorted out how Nico and I would be planning our visits. All the friends I’d contacted in the area back in June when this first entered the horizon were pinged and the wheels began turning. I had to skip a guest lecture because somehow, in the moment, nothing was more important than understanding what the next week would bring. By lunch time, I still delivered the chèvre chaud salad that’s become a weekly staple at Salad Club, and that evening I stuck to our first casual afterwork half-marathon as planned. I seemed suspiciously fine. Over the next half week, I focused on preparing and working and didn’t feel much.

The next set of tears came in the uber last Monday evening. All the planning and prep work was done. Our furbabies had their care plans. The black dresses had been sourced. The bags were packed, the agenda packed solid, and all that was left was the follow the carefully laid plans. To begin to be present. To acknowledge that this was it: time to say the last goodbye.

One red-eye later, we were ferried from the airport straight to Grandpa’s house. The backdrop for so many Christmases and Thanksgivings and Easters, the fathers’ and mothers’ days, the informal family Sunday get-togethers, would now be the backdrop one last time as we sent off the final member of that generation. There are no more grandparents left, just the smell of their tobacco permanently woven into the fabric of the home that cradled every one of my aunts and uncles, the seat of the Aloia lineage for the past 68 years. It feels wrong that soon this property will pass to other hands, that there isn’t anything left for us at 4 Cherry Lane.

I was struck, at the wake, by the items that made it into his coffin, the mementos that summarize a near century navigating this planet and all its (and his) changes. There was the Marines memorabilia and of course the cross, the fly fishing gear, and a winning hand of cribbage. There was a Cuban cigar with a banana sticker stuck atop, an homage to the quirky banana label collection Grandpa began in retirement. And that was it: a life in several items, lying alongside a man who even in death had fabulous bone structure and hardly a wrinkle to betray his 95 years. How strange that this was what it’s boiled down to, physically speaking. This and the souls - those left behind, perhaps a hundred or so, gathered in his honor; quite the crowd for a man who outlived so many of his peers.

At the funeral the next day, the eulogies reminded us that the biggest footprints Grandpa left behind aren’t physically tangible. But what left me aching, as I’m afraid I’d realized in the days and months prior, was how little of an individual relationship I’d actually lost. He was a figurehead, a titan in the family, and a wonderfully loving man, but how much did we individually know each other? When asked to take a moment, seated in that pew, as the final eulogy drew to a close, to call upon a cherished memory, to hold it, and to carry it with me as I proceeded down the aisle, I struggled. The only conversation I could even recall was the one just before moving off for grad school when he’d warned me not to become too French - one it would seem I failed to heed, not to his disappointment. I think I was most touched when, at the reception, his youngest brother personally sought me out to let me know how proud he and Grandpa and everyone was of what I was doing, and to keep it up. Oh, the Neuralink stuff? I asked. No, everything, ever since you were little, he said, and that was that, on to the next conversation. It helped to know that even if we weren’t always chatting, he’d been watching, he’d known what I was up to, and he’d been proud. I often feel I let the family down, jetting off to all corners of the earth chasing big dreams as we celebrate the family devotion and commitment that I fear I fail to embody. It’s a comfort to hear I still had my place in the mix.

And less than 30 hours after convening in New Jersey, it was time for the Aloia clan to say their goodbyes, to scatter off in all directions with promises of reunions in the not too distant future. I think they’ll happen. And in them, Grandpa’s legacy lives.

He died holding his children’s hands, fluttered his eyes open one last time just before his final breath, surrounded by them in the home that had held them and so much chaos and love for so many years. In our last moments in that home, Nico and I made a round of gestational carrier picks that may have led to our first hit, so the legacy of love and family remains deeply tied to that site for all of us. And now our stories continue.