My grandfather would regularly mess up managing his diabetes nearly every Christmas we spent with him and end up in a diabetic rage. I honestly couldn't recount any single one of his diabetic rages because they've all kind of congealed together in my head over time.

Three parts that stand out though:

• One of the rages was set off because he couldn't find the pen he had been using to track his blood sugar levels (he liked to use one pen from new to dried out) so he had to use a new one.
• One of them, my father had to step between my grandfather and my mother and stare my grandfather down because my grandfather was fixing to beat my mother.
• One of them, someone in the family called the police on my grandfather because of his shit.

Those may have been all the same incident, but I remember the rages happening on more than one Christmas.

It's hard to square that shit with all the good memories I had with him. I've learned over the years that he was a shit father before he had grandkids too. But he was (excepting the diabetic rages) a good grandfather to me and my cousins.

Life can be weird like that.