Wearing My Grandfather’s Coat on Samhain

Last updated on: November 2, 2015 at 7:19 pm by Tom Swiss

Wearing My Grandfather’s Coat on Samhain 2015-11-02T19:19:10-04:00 Tom Swiss

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My father’s father, Len Swiss, died twenty-five years ago this Christmas. When we went through his things a few weeks later I found that his coat fit me. I’ve had it in the back of my closet all these years; it has a few small tears that need sewing up, one missing button and one broken one. It’s been one of those sewing projects I never got around to. (Not that I have any skill at tailoring, but I can sew on a button or mend a small tear. Or, heck, if I were a more organized person I could find a friend with better sewing skills or just drop a few dollars at a dry cleaners with a seamster on site, but such small projects tend to be endlessly put off.)

I don’t know why it came into my mind recently, but I pulled it out today. I didn’t wake up this morning with the intention of doing any ancestor work, but in magic as in poetry the rule is simple: work with the inspiration that appears. The tears were smaller than I remembered, not bad enough to keep me from wearing it until they’re fixed.

I was a few weeks shy of twenty-one when he died, and he was a few weeks shy of seventy-nine — my birthday is the day after his, and my father’s is five days before, we sometimes had triple family birthday parties. I knew him as the family patriarch, father to my father, my uncle, and my aunt, grandfather to my cousin, my brother, and me, even as I saw him worn down in the last years of his life by caring for my grandmother through her serious health problems. He knew me as an infant, a boy, a teen, but never really as a man.

I remember him in this coat, just barely, a few mental snapshots.

Maybe I left that coat in the closet because I had to grow into it. Of course we’ve grown into very different people; he was father of three, a traditional Polish Catholic, a career officer in the Baltimore City Fire Department, where I’m a single Zen Pagan dilettante. And yet as my father’s father he was a big part of my model of manhood. His gentleness, good humor, readiness to express emotion and yet maintain a calm strength…I like to think I’ve grown into those qualities enough to wear his coat.

Grandpop Len is center in the bow tie, with my Grandmom Bert (short for Bertha) in front of him.

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