My Granddad’s Bear

For as long as I can remember, there has been a bear in my grandfather’s house.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a bear in my grandfather’s house. More specifically, it was a taxidermy Alaskan grizzly bear, a massive snarling lump with grey-blond fur who measured seven feet from snout to tail, and stood half-crouched upon a wooden stand scattered with fake shrubs and real rocks. The bear was, as I mentioned, very large, and thus would not fit in the living room. He was far too regal to be relegated to the basement, and would have swallowed my granddad’s bedroom whole with his grand mass.

And so he lorded over the sunroom, tucked into the right-hand corner across from the single-person hot tub my granddad bought for himself after his final back surgery, forever peering out across the deck into the trees out back. I loved him very much, and have always delighted in showing him off to various friends and boyfriends, who were understandably startled when I beckoned them in “to meet Poppy’s bear.”

(Did I mention that I was raised in a hunting family? That’s probably an important contextual element to add, lest you think I was raised by a pack of homicidal monsters [though which, in the perspective of certain vegans, I suppose I was]).

He was not alone in the house, either. More bears lived in the basement, alongside a majestic elk and some ugly wild boars and a forlorn coyote and an unassuming whitetail deer. My grandmother would not allow the beasts above ground, save for the Big Bear (whose bulk was far too great to navigate down the narrow stairs). And so they stayed down below, motionless and quiet in the dark, until my granddad needed to grab another bottle of gin or I came scampering down to play with the computer or curl up on the bearskin rug and do homework.

Their basement never felt ominous like my parents’, which was filled with my dad’s weapons and hunting gear (which did not bother me) but was always cold. When I would be sent down to grab something from the big freezer for dinner, my bare feet would shudder on the concrete floor and weird noises would float out from the dark corner near the boiler (which bothered me Very Much).

My grandparents’ basement was always cool and silent and full of slightly interesting objects, like old books and older guns and even older photos of them when they were young, plus my granddad’s well-stocked bar, which I was always too much of a goody-goody to sample. Years later, though, that peace was shattered in a flood. The basement went under. My granddad fought and fought against the water, but the water won. The whole thing had to be redone. Many of the bears went moldy, and had to be disposed of in an ignominious second death. I was sad to see them go, but at least we still had the Big Bear. He was safe aboveground.

A couple of years after the flood, we found out about the cancer. It took its sweet time, but eventually, the water won this round, too, flooding my granddad’s lungs and stealing his breath. He died in March, as the world was beginning to shift, and I am still not over it. I don’t know that anyone truly gets over such a thing, and I don’t know that I see the point in trying to pretend. The last thing I want to do is forget about him, and the idea of letting go entirely seems a bit too risky. The last time I saw anyone in my family was a few days after he finally let go, when my dad and uncle and I descended on my grandparents’ house to pick through his possessions in search of spare memories. I already knew going in that I wanted the Big Bear.

But the Big Bear’s rotund character presented a problem. I live in a small and cozy trinity house in Philadelphia; he would have subsumed a good two-thirds of my living room, and would never have made it up the winding stairs to my equally compact kitchen, let alone to the bedroom further up. Fitting two adult humans in here can already be a challenge, so adding an ursine roommate simply would not have worked. However, not to be deterred, I informed everyone that I would figure it out, and that the Big Bear was not to be touched until I did so.

For now, he was fine in his sunroom, gazing out into the backyard where my granddad’s workshop now sat silent. I was not in a rush, because I did not think I needed to be; no one else wanted to deal with him. By then, his golden fur had been faded by the sun, and there were a few cobwebs around his ears, but he was still big and handsome and solid. He was dependable. As a deadly disease made its way back and forth across the globe, as the world continued to turn and lives were lost and new ones were created and a thousand years passed every five days or so, he sat there, guarding a dead man’s sanctuary, waiting to come home.

But today, I called my grandma (as you do; it’s Sunday, after all) and she told me something deeply concerning. Really, I could scarcely believe my ears. After spending innumerable decades as his begrudging landlady, she currently did not know where the Big Bear was!

How does one lose a seven-foot Alaskan grizzly bear? His feet don’t even work! He has been dead for longer than I have been able to drink or vote or wear a bra! What fresh hell is this!

That’s what went through my mind as she told me this astonishingly terrible news. It had recently been discovered that Big Bear was sitting under a leaky part of the roof, and that his fur had quietly gone moldy in parts, just like that of his brothers who’d been lost in the flood. She said that “my father” had taken him away, and perhaps thrown him out, or given him to some people who knew what to do with bears like him. The details remain unclear, as is the identity of the bear thief, because my grandma has Alzheimer’s and has always tended to refer to any adult male relative of mine as “my father” anyway.

When I texted my actual father about it, he was as puzzled as I am, and assured me that he would not have betrayed me in such a manner. He knew I wanted the bear, and understood why. Given how many creatures I’ve wheedled my way into prising off his own walls (so far, two whitetails and more skulls than are really polite to mention), I’m sure he’s just relieved I’ve stopped eyeing up his caribou… for now. I suspect my uncle, who is not big on communication (or, more damningly, bears).

My love for taxidermy is not just a goth-y affectation. The men in my family have always been hunters, and fishermen, and woodsmen. The women tend to prefer the sea; my aunt and my paternal grandma are avid fishers and boaters, and when it comes time to cook and cure and smoke the meat itself, it is a gender-neutral endeavor. There are black sheep in every family, though, and out of an entire side of our sprawling Irish/Romanian clan, there have only ever been two girl children—my sister and me.

While I always loved playing with the bow and arrow my dad made me, when the time came for me to join him on a real hunt, I demurred; as a child, I didn’t want to kill Bambi, and was more interested in Girl Scouts and my soccer team than waking up at 4AM to go sit in a tree with a gun. I do regret not going with him now, and we’ve been slowly working our way back towards that point (a shared interest in firearms has helped). My habit of sweetly bullying him into handing over deer heads and collecting interesting bones for me is one of the most enduring parts of our perpetually complicated relationship.

For his part, my granddad was even more antiquated (and very sexist!) in his views about what women should and should not do, so it never really came up with him. Besides, he didn't need some pigtailed rugrat slowing him down. Poppy hunted the way he did everything—big. He wasn’t content with stalking deer in the Jersey woods or driving up to Maine upon occasion to hunt moose; he was the guy loudly arguing with the TSA about bringing various gigantic rifles through security (and invariably winning). Before he hit his eighties, he made it a point to travel up to Alaska every few years, either on a cruise or on a hunt. That’s where he got most of his bears, including the big one. We ate them, of course; shooting an animal for mere sport is weak and cruel and contemptible, and bear meat is delicious provided you’ve got a good crockpot and a few hours to spare.

I had always half-planned on going up to Alaska with my granddad to hunt or just to experience it with him, to see it the way he saw it. I know he loved the big sky and the quiet and the solitude, and I’ve always felt the most myself in those kinds of places, too. When I was going through some of his things that day in March, I found a small packet of photos he’d taken up there. I idly flipped through them, expecting standard hunting trophies, but found something else.

Nestled in that stack under shots of him proudly posing next to his kills and joke photos with his hunting buddies, there were… landscapes. Wine-pink sunrises and ghostly blue treelines and snowy vistas, snapshots of moments he thought were beautiful. They were lovely photos on their own, but I was shocked to think that my granddad, a man who had never stepped foot in a museum and was boomingly masculine to a fault, had taken them. I wonder what else I’ll never know about him.

I brought the photos home with me, and now they are tucked away in the ancient trunk that moonlights as my semi-functional coffee table. My boyfriend and I had stumbled across the trunk at an antique market one sunny weekend, back when you could do such things; he’d successfully haggled its owner down to an excellent price and carried it back home on his strong brown shoulders. It is creaky and smells of cedar, its insides papered with faded florals. It’s a good place to hide treasures. It sits just a few feet away from two of my granddad’s smaller bears, because of course some of them had to come and live with me while I chewed over the problem of what to do with their big brother.

My best plan thus far has been to ignore the problem until I can’t any longer, and then get a storage space here in Philly to park him until I move into a bigger place. This latest wrinkle has thrown that off, though, and now I have to figure out where this goddamn bear has gone—and if I can still save him. The odds are, I can’t, and it’s a truly awful feeling. When my grandma broke the news to me earlier today, I couldn’t help but burst into tears. This did not help matters at all, because we are not that kind of family, and now here I was, weeping down the phone at her over what was, essentially, a moldy stuffed bear.

It was never just a bear, though. I guess it felt like I’d lost another piece of him, at a time when too much of him had already slipped away. It’s been six months since he died, and six months since I hugged my grandma, and every minute of that has been too much. I knew he was the kind of man who could fly to Alaska and bring home a grizzly, but I’d never known the side of him that would take the time to snap a photo of a sunset. Losing the bear was a reminder that, now, I never will, and that knowledge cuts bone deep.

But even if I can’t find Big Bear, I have to remember that I can still take comfort in the other pieces of him that have ended up in my house, and in my heart, and tucked away in that old trunk—especially those small, static glimpses into the man he was when no one else was watching.