It's funny how grief takes you by surprise.

A friend and I were talking about someone, and the topic of male pattern baldness came up, how it is inherited from the mother's side.

I thought of how my mother's parents always said I was lucky to get their genes, and I remembered how my father's father had a crown of wispy hairs around his head toward the end of his life, how he spent two months with us in our home, too weak to stand unassisted, and one day he looked at himself in the mirror and said musingly, "I'm growin' a moustache... I didn't know I was growin' a moustache! Gotta go down to a barber and get this shaved off."

For days he said this. And eventually, one evening after her work shift, my mother took him to a barbershop.

Following a few weeks of minor physical therapy, grandpa must have been feeling pretty good about himself, because he tried to get out of the car on his own and he fell over backwards. An ambulance came and took him from the parking lot of the strip mall where the little barber shop was. We never took him home again. He spent the next few weeks in hospitals and hospices before passing away.

I miss my grandfather.