My Grandfather Helps Me Find Myself, Even Though He's Gone

No one in my family knows why I started calling my grandfather Oompa. My mom has speculated that it had something to do with Willie Wonka and that I associated him with the candy he always had on hand. But she couldn’t be sure since I’d started using the term as soon as I could speak. He was never “Grandpa” to me, always Oompa. And as the oldest grandchild, I got to set the rules. Whatever the origin, the name stuck—so well that for years he had it on his license plate.

I thought about this a lot in the days I spent at my grandparents’ house after he passed away. The house, tucked back into the woods on a windy back road, was bustling with activity. My mom, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings—everyone was working on the yard or going through photo albums in the house, helping my grandmother however we could as we tried to wrap our minds around the fact Oompa was gone.

Oompa’s death had been sudden and unexpected. The call that he’d suffered a stroke came after school, followed not long after by a call that he seemed to be doing better and might recover. The next morning, when I woke up, my mom, who’d been at the hospital, told me he’d taken a turn late in the night and passed away. He was sixty-six.

One of the tragedies of childhood is that it’s only in retrospect that we can get a sense of how complex the adults in our lives truly were. This is especially true for Oompa, who was quite possibly the most interesting man in Tiskilwa, Illinois. In years to come, we’d learn he’d made his own Buster Keaton-style silent films and met Barack Obama during his first run for Illinois State Senate. He was a man of many talents, who fashioned a rideable Thomas the Tank Engine out of a lawnmower and built a swingset in the basement. He enjoyed making candy; when we sold his homemade fudge at garage sales, the line to buy it would wrap around the block.

Born and raised in Chicago, Oompa had little time or patience for the many things that irritated him, but made a habit of stopping to check overturned boxes in case kittens had been thrown from a car. He once told me a folktale about a man who never spoke, and was thus thought of as a genius even though he wasn’t one. After he passed away, I realized the folktale was actually the plot of Being There.

My grandmother kept busy in the days after he passed. She started going through his collections of old videotapes and radios, pulling out photo albums and passing them around to everyone in the living room. But there was one she handed just to me, a thin album with a flowered cover I didn’t recognize. She said she wanted me to have it, as if she expected me to recognize it. But I’d never seen it before.

I flipped it open and found a sheet of notebook paper. In marker, in Oompa’s handwriting, was: What I Did This Summer, M. J. Tully, “Oompa”

“What is this?” I asked my grandmother.

“It’s been on the bookshelf in the dining room for years now,” she said. “You’ve walked right past it a hundred times.”

On the next page there was a date: Summer, 1993. And the start of an essay. “This summer I hung around with Bridget a lot,” he’d written, referring to me by my full name. “She is five years old. It was one of the best summers I have had since I was a kid.”

The essay was fifteen pages long, and included details and photos of our various adventures. Our trips to the creek that ran near their house, where, Oompa explained, “Our job was to investigate everything.” The route we’d take on walks, be it through a shortcut in the woods or along the road; “Bridget likes the road better. I think it gives her more time to talk.” The pool he set up in the backyard so we could swim and play a game called, “Shark. The shark was good.” The tent in the backyard, where he set up a TV and a light. My younger brother, who was two that summer, makes appearances as well; “Whenever we need someone to throw rocks or take water out of the pool, we call Mike.”

I remembered that summer so distinctly. Oompa had suffered a heart attack earlier that year and retired, but was well enough for me to spend days on end at their house. While my grandmother worked, he and I would spend the day exploring, playing games, and talking. Going through the essay and pictures—of the creek where we’d spent so much time, of the canteen he dutifully filled with Kool-Aid for me before our adventures, of our setup for watching movies after being in the pool—was like finding a time capsule that had sat within my reach for over a decade.

My family loves to tell our stories. Repeating them back and forth to one another is quite possibly our greatest family hobby. In the days after Oompa’s death, I heard over and over the same one: That as a very young child, I had chosen Oompa, and he loved me fiercely. I was told that when I needed a minor dental procedure at age four, I’d walked out of the back of the office and whispered the word “Oompa” through my tears, a request my mom honored immediately.

I was told no one could criticize me in his presence without him jumping to my defense, even though he was the first person to tell me when I was acting carelessly. We talked about the way he would set up a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a lamp, and a desk chair around the television, so the cast of The Brave Little Toaster could watch movies with us. We remembered that, at age seven, I’d written a “Father of the Year” essay about him, which he kept framed above his desk for the rest of his life.

I felt more than nostalgia while I read his essay, a process that took days, as every time I tried, I broke down in tears. As we told stories, some surprised me not because of the generosity he showed, or the creativity, or the willingness to engage so fully with a little girl who wanted to be Robin Hood. What surprised me was the unabiding faith he had in who I was, not just as a little girl, but as a person. My mom told me that, around age five, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, a whim I outgrew very quickly. But when I told Oompa, he turned to my mom and said, “Can you imagine having someone like her fighting for you?”

His essay was laced with similar observations about this strange, talkative five-year-old kid. “She talks all the time,” he wrote, “It is not nonsense. She’s a very interesting and interested little girl.” He noted that I called a fire pit where we would sit and talk as my “favorite place.” He was surprised by this. “She says these things very offhanded and it makes you feel warm that she remembers. She remembers a lot—so she makes you feel good a lot.” He went on, “She was the best company and medicine I could have gotten. She is just a nice little girl.”

When Oompa passed away, when I discovered his essay, I was sixteen, emerging from my long awkward phase and poised to begin my senior year of high school. He and I had been less close as I moved into my teen years and as the social obligations of high school took priority over all else. I struggled with what I would later learn was anxiety and worried constantly about what people thought about me, despite cultivating an air of being above all that.

I was insecure, nervous about college applications, and had internalized the objectification that teenage girls are fed by peers and culture alike. I didn’t feel nice, or interesting, or like someone who could fight formidably for others; I was scared, terrified I wasn’t enough. It was hard to see myself as the confident little girl Oompa saw then.

It didn’t get easier. Halfway through my first year of college, I started to grapple with depression. I left my university at the end of freshman year to live at home and go to community college, where I continued to struggle. My grades tanked. I got involved with a man who didn’t respect me or see me as the capable, strong force Oompa did. The version of me this man reflected back was the antithesis of how Oompa or his essay had made me feel about myself—that I was smart, empathic, curious, and enough.

I was driving to classes, crying, when I thought about the essay my grandmother had given me. I’d been going to community college for about a year, with a low GPA and a sense that doors would start closing soon. On the radio, the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on. I’d avoided it since Oompa’s memorial three years before; having that song played was the only thing he wanted of his funeral, and I couldn’t hear it without breaking down.

But that day, I let it play and I thought about him. What would he say if he saw me then? How would I explain what had happened to that little girl he trusted to take on the world? Would he be proud of me, or was I letting him down?

I knew the answer. Oompa had never shied away from letting me know when he thought I was making a mistake or acting foolishly. Often, he’d tell me I knew what I had to do and not let me off the hook when I made excuses. But sometimes he delivered more pointed messages, which I didn’t always appreciate as a child. At age fifteen, when I told him I was waiting to see what my boyfriend wanted to do on a Friday night, he seriously implored me to never follow a man, to never let a boy tell me what I was going to do.

How would I explain what had happened to that little girl he trusted to take on the world? Would he be proud of me, or was I letting him down?

The only time he’d ever lost his patience with me, I was eight years old and let a mouse loose in the house. He’d never yelled at me before, and I’d accepted his apology by saying it was okay. “It’s not okay,” he said. “It’s never okay for anyone to speak to you like that.” To this day, I remember the fact that he thought I deserved respect and should expect it from others. If he could have surveyed my life now, I knew he would not have been proud of what he saw.

That was a turning point, if a rough one. I made plans to go back to the university I’d left, was accepted for readmission for the coming semester, and moved back to Chicago, where I excelled. When I was overwhelmed, or unsure, or tired, I’d imagine explaining to Oompa what I was doing—the long hours, the study abroad trip to Kenya, the papers I was writing—and ask myself if he’d be proud of what he heard. When I could answer yes, I’d always feel a weight lift.

“Would Oompa be proud of me?” became my personal litmus test. I asked it a few months after graduation, when I realized I’d moved across country with a man who didn’t respect me, while driving around the desert town I was living in and listening to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I asked it when I was working as an assistant in St. Louis, unsure of how I’d segue into a career that used my degree in political science. I asked it when I was living in Washington, DC, as I considered changing fields to become a writer.

Oompa became that little guiding voice in the back of my head. Each time I listened to it became a hinge on which my life pivoted. I left the man who didn’t love me. I went to graduate school. I started writing professionally. I married a compassionate man who makes me laugh, believes in me unconditionally, and lets me know I’m acting like a doofus, just like Oompa did. As a child, I always trusted Oompa and took his guidance to heart. When I’ve done the same as an adult, it’s helped me make the decisions of which I am most proud.

My family isn’t religious, but we have a saying that we do believe in Oompa. We joke about possible signals he could send us from the beyond, or that cardinals, his favorite bird, are a sign he’s keeping an eye on us. But in a very real way, he’s remained an active force in my life, giving me an ideal version of myself to live up to when I can’t figure out where to head next.

Whenever I feel untethered, unsure of myself, or uncertain I’m doing the right thing, I return to Oompa’s essay, which I’ve now hauled across states and oceans. I think about him writing it, possibly when I was busying myself in another room or watching an old Universal movie at his feet. I try to take myself back to that summer. I imagine the fast-talking little girl and the grandfather who loved her, walking hand-in-hand to the creek, both of them just happy to be in one another’s company.

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