The last Steelers game my grandfather saw was the 25-13 win last season over the Arizona Cardinals, a game he watched from the hospital in Pittsburgh he had been unexpectedly admitted to that weekend. The next day he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. By Friday, he was dead.
My parents moved away from Pittsburgh to pursue teaching jobs before I was born. They settled in Baltimore, and by virtue of birth my brothers and I joined the global diaspora of Steelers fans.
My grandfather was a hard-working and honorable man, and a supremely decent person. He loved his family — family is the most important thing, he reminded us every visit — and he loved the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Growing up, interactions with our extended family were sometimes limited to annual trips home to Pittsburgh at Christmas and in the summer. In some ways, each visit felt like starting over again and like we were walking in on the middle of a conversation that continued all year without us. Our family was warm and unfailingly kind, but we felt a pervasive and inescapable sense of “otherness” simply because of where we lived and what we felt like we were missing.
Being able to talk about the Steelers was a point of re-entry for us. In that context, “Did you see the game this weekend?” was more than idle banter — it was a shared touchpoint in a universal language. Sports are merely a diversion for some, but for us they were something more.
The Steelers helped keep as family those whom geography would make strangers.
As I have gotten older, I have gotten to know my extended family well and have, of course, realized how much we’ve always had in common. The advent of cellphones, email and Facebook has made it easier to keep up with one another day-to-day, and I now take my own family on trips back to Pittsburgh. But I remain grateful to the Steelers for giving me the vocabulary I needed as a child to help bridge distance and lost time.
My brothers and I spent two days in the hospital with our grandfather before he died. If he knew that he was dying, he barely let on. He nimbly jumped from topic to topic as family came and went.
He thought Steelers coach Keith Butler was doing “an A-1 job” with the defense. When a nurse became sick, he shared his preferred cold remedy (tea with honey and whiskey). He talked about being in the Navy during World War II and drinking “rum-and-Coca-Colas” with friends on trips to New York City. He told us about the time when he was young that he saw Pirates slugger Dino Restelli in West Wilmerding, red bandanna spilling out of his back pocket. He told me that he liked how my brothers and I always stuck together and how proud he was of the fathers that we had become. “Family is the most important thing,” he said.
Our family is now navigating the series of bittersweet firsts that occurs after a loved one dies, from the monumental to the mundane — first holidays, first birth, first trip on the turnpike, first bite of pierogi. My grandfather is everywhere.
Soon, we will add to the list his first missed season of Steelers football. I will think of my grandfather every time I pull on a Steelers sweatshirt, every time my brothers and I get together for a game, every time I visit with a cousin or aunt or uncle, and on countless occasions in between. And I will surely think of him when the Steelers bring their 2016 season to an end, hopefully on Super Bowl Sunday 2017.
After all, the Steelers are family, and family is the most important thing.
Brian Kaminski is the father of three and works in public affairs in Washington, D.C. (briankaminski@rational360.com).
First Published: October 8, 2016, 4:00 a.m.