my Omas funeral

Among my four grandparents, two of them were especially dear to me. They were my mother's father (my "grandpa") and my father's mother (my "Oma")^note. My grandpa was the tinkerer and the one who'd retained the most of his childlike wonder. And my Oma was not only my only grandmother for many years (my mother's mother died when I was 3 1/2 years old) but was the amazingly plain-spoken, no-nonsense woman who could knock us down to size even while pampering us.

My Opa and I, by contrast, were never as close. I was only 22 when he died, and he was not in good health during the last decade or so of his life. But before that there had always been a bit of a wall between us due, on his part, to his increasingly shaky English (he'd up and moved to Canada at the age of 54 without any English!), his erratic and dystempered nature, his impossible-to-please expectations, and to a lesser extent even his savage world view. And on my part, I was young and counter-authoritarian and spoke little German at all. I regret the distance that kept us apart, but it was inevitable—the gap between us was enourmous.

I went to visit my Oma on a fairly regular basis over the years, often going as often as every Sunday for years at a time. While my uncle Wolf actually took care of her and the property, I'd breeze in and out to say 'hi' and to enjoy some company. This carried on even in post-card- and letter-writing right until the time she died.

She died shortly after I'd returned to Canada from a year and a half in Australia. I'd only just stopped in at Vancouver to visit with Ken and Heidi for the first time since I'd left when we got the news that she'd gone into the hospital and was hallucinating and seemed to be incoherent. We agreed with the family's conclusions that it might not be best to pester her with phone calls under such circumstances (what do you say to someone who is dying and probably isn't going to recognize you, anyway?) and simply got ready to travel back to Niagara for the inevitable funeral.

At the funeral / memorial service (never really understood the difference), my mother suggested that I speak as I had at my grandfather's funeral. But my return to Canada had been prompted by my fiancee's ending our engagement, and I was feeling pretty shell-shocked. In fact, one of the last times I'd seen my Oma was when I had taken my now-ex-fiancee and her five-year-old niece along for a visit. Zoëaut;, the niece, had been in a crying mood all weekend, and my ex and I had been at a loss to figure out what to do with her. My Oma had been able to somehow talk to her, get the girl to sit in her lap, and to get her in a happy mood in no time flat.

This was the story that came to mind when I thought of speaking of my Oma's memory, but I just couldn't do it. I was never going to see my Oma, the ex, or the niece again, and it was too much at the time.

But this was the kind of thing that my Oma could do flawlessly. I suppose it comes from having handled five children of her own of that age and two grandchildren as well, but it was an awe-inspiring thing to watch. And it was the sort of thing that had always indeared by Oma to me. She just had a knack for stuff that mattered.

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