Jewell

This is my grandpa Jewell. Well, this is a collection of my extended family, anyway. The guy with the suspenders is my grandpa. He died today of esophageal cancer.

I found this out on Facebook. My cousin, Ryan, posted a status about it. I still have zero details other than, hey, he's not alive.

The nice old lady next to him is my grandma, Jan. They got married in 1988, maybe? 1989? Which makes him my step-grandpa, but he's been in my family for so long that it doesn't even matter that we're not blood related. He's still my grandpa.

I was the flower girl at their wedding. I haven't had more than 5 conversations with that man in my entire life that he hasn't reminded me of that I did a "duck walk" up the aisle at their wedding. He even teased me about it on my own wedding day (which is actually where this picture is from). As annoying as it usually was, I'm going to miss his constant reminder of the time I made an ass out of myself when I was still in pull-ups.

He wasn't always my favorite person. Just because he died there's no point in lying about it. He was like everybody else, he could be annoying, and he could be an asshole. But he was a fairly nice guy, very funny, and he had this amazing deep, booming voice that always reminded me of cannons. He could have been on radio, even though he'd probably prefer to be on Christian radio since he was a very, very religious man, which, at times, made it hard to get along with him, since I stopped going to church every week back in 2004. However, he was a good person, and I'm going to miss him.