Fred Szabo, 1914-2008

My mother's father died on Monday night, Fred Szabo. He died of complications from a stroke after a very short stay in a hospice last night around 2030. He was 93 according to my mother, I'm not sure the math works out correctly, but the point is he lived a long life, and was active nearly to the end, we should all be that fortunate.

It was a rarity I didn't quite grasp in suburban Toledo, Ohio and rural Michigan when I was a small boy. My mother had two fathers. Divorces and divorced people were treated like your cousin who is in jail, not talked about in polite society. I knew my mother didn't care for him too much, but he seemed, to a small child, to be a generous man, who showed up on rare occasions and we could call grandpa, bonus attention. My mother's step-father served as my day-to-day grandfather, but this mysterious man would show up in his big car and whisk us away to places we didn't normally go. I don't want to be overly poetic about it, the occasions were very rare, and the last I saw of him I was an angry teenager.

Naturally, as you grow up, you get to learn all that stuff you didn't actually want to know in the first place, family gossip, who did who to what, and I had thirty years of that. My mother fairly well vilified him, and being the person I am, I took her at her word. It turns out, there are two sides to every story, and maybe even fifty years ago, it took two people to ruin most marriages. I got to learn these things as my mother went through the slow process of making peace with the man, which reached it's dramatic high point late last year.

I really only know him through the eyes of my mother, and the facts that I do know about him. He was a good businessman and for whatever it is worth, he stayed with the same woman the entire time that I have been alive. I've also so learned that some wounds run so deep that fifty or sixty years is not enough time to even acknowledge them, not just to have them heal.

Szabo is my Hungarian heritage, and I admit it, I don't know a lot about it past some of the wonderful meals my mother made. I do know much more about my Irish heritage, and so next time I have a drink, I'll raise my glass to a man I never knew, in hope that at the end of my life, I will. May God accept him with open arms.