April 21, 2021
Montevideo, Uruguay
This is a post long overdue. I kept telling myself,
“Okay, after Christmas I’m going to write another post.”
“Okay, after New Years I’m going to write another post.”
“Okay, after St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Okay, after Easter?”
A lot has happened, and part of me just wants to enjoy the moments instead of relay those moments on to the rest of the world (or the 10 of you that actually read what I write). And this post won’t cover everything that happened, nor will it give justice to how much I’ve loved the last few months of my life here.
I have 6 weeks left in Uruguay.
I’m scared to leave.
I’m scared to go back to the United States.
I’m scared to move to England later on this year.
I feel like I’m living three separate lives. I need to make the most of the rest of my time in Uruguay, prepare to experience a changed U.S. from the one that I left, and prepare myself again for another country and another culture, all within a matter of about 4 months. AND do it during a global pandemic. Easy, right?
I’ve also been dealing with a lot of change. And while I could write about the fantastic summer I had (socially distancing of course) at the beach, creating new friendships, or the work I’m doing, I want to dedicate this post to talk about three very important individuals:
Robert Niemeier, Diego Frisch, and Ruth Watson. All of them are my grandparents, 1 biological and 2 adoptive, respectively. And all three have died within the last three months.
This isn’t meant to be a sad post, because for me, these people were more than the moment when their physical bodies left this earth. And that’s what I want to share with all of you. The light they gave me and how it’s changed my perspective in the last few months, the lessons that they taught me before and are continuing to show me in the memories I carry with me.
I want to start with Diego and Ruth, the most lovely couple I have ever been introduced to, just a few months after I arrived in Uruguay.
Their love story is one that could be made into a movie, I swear. They first met when he went to England to study and was invited over to Ruth’s house by her brother. You see, he’s from Uruguay, and she’s from England. He later returned to Uruguay, and after many exchanged love letters and a proposal, Ruth decided to pack up and move to South America, her family thinking they’d never see her again. After 3 weeks, sailing across the ocean by ship, Ruth arrived in Uruguay where Diego was waiting for her.
The love they created and shared together was shown in the way they welcomed every human and animal into their home as if it were one of their own children. It was the way they welcomed me. I remember being so excited to meet them. I had only been in Uruguay for about a month or two and was still REALLY struggling with Spanish. I confided in Ruth with this struggle the first day I met her...
“Gosh, I’m so excited to be able to speak English! Spanish is SO hard.”
“Oh, it’s tough. But after I had been struggling for months, one week it just clicked for me. I was listening to the radio and it just clicked. It will for you, too,” she told me.
“Yeah, I know eventually I’ll get the hang of it. It’s just really frustrating right now. I just need to keep practicing.”
Ruth laughed, “You might want to practice your English as well.”
And that was Ruth with her acidic humor. Always telling me my American accent or "other language" needed work and to let her know when I wanted to learn proper English, 90% joking and 10% being completely serious.
But with every jest, she always ended it with, “And when are you going to come again to play?”
Diego, while leaving the jokes to Ruth, was an expert in story telling. When he spoke, everyone stopped talking for fear of missing any detail to his tales. A favorite tagline he’d use was,
“Well it was this, that, and all the rest.”
Which, I’m still not actually sure what that means, but it wasn’t a good story if he didn’t add that in there at least once.
Ruth and Diego were attached at the hip. They were one body and one soul. When Ruth was diagnosed with leukemia and eventually died in March, it felt apparent to everyone that Diego literally couldn’t live without her. He had had a fall shortly after she was diagnosed, and his conditioned worsened until he died in April.
They were both vital to my time here. Ruth would tell me to come play with the cat, and Diego would harp on me to continue practicing the piano while he sat in his study and listened occasionally shouting, "Again!" until he was satisfied.
I won’t get to hear another joke or another story, but it brings me peace to know they’re not suffering. And now it feels like my responsibility to carry on and demonstrate that same generosity that they showed me to someone else. It was a love unlike anything I had ever seen.
Robert was my grandfather on my mother’s side and died at 98-years-old.
I honestly thought he’d make it to 100, but I suppose 98 isn’t too shabby! After his dementia worsened, my parents moved him from a nursing home in Cambridge, NE to one in Hastings, NE, where my parents live.
My grandpa was a man of few words. I think a big part of that was from what I’m going to call undiagnosed PTSD from WWII. Needless to say, I can count how many times on 2 hands that I ever had a full conversation with my grandpa. Usually he would just sit quietly while the rest of us carried on talking amongst ourselves, which he seemed content enough with. And even though we had few conversations, I really got to know him over the last few months of his life, even though I wasn’t physically near him.
My grandfather had been living in Hastings in a memory care home for some time, but just within the last year or two was when they finally sold his house in Cambridge, which meant rummaging through the whole house that hadn’t really hadn’t been touched since my grandmother and his wife died when I was about 3 or so.
And a lot was discovered, especially in the old trunks in the basement, a place we were told as kids was not allowed…of course we always snuck down anyway. However, upon further inspection, there were old diaries found by my mom and her sister, daily entries from when he was serving in the Navy during the war.
In one entry he wrote, “We arrived on the island and found about 200 dead bodies. Smelled like hell.”
My grandpa never talked much, but he ESPECIALLY didn’t want to talk about the war. If you’d ask, he’d either say no or pretend he didn’t hear you, which was an easy and probable excuse with his hearing aids. But that diary entry really hit me. The first thought that came into my mind was, “Oh my gosh, that’s trauma.” Which, of course it was. And it’s not like I had imagined that being in war wasn't traumatic, but I think that sentence struck a different chord in me.
This diary entry was found while he was still alive, and when my mom read it out loud to me, I just wanted to get on a plane and go hug my grandpa. We’d never been super close, partly due to his lack of conversational skills, but that helped me understand him better. It was a vulnerable part of him I had not been privy to previously. And it made me think of how many things like that had happened and he had no one to share it with except for the paper and pen he had with him.
I think I do that sometimes. I use my pen and my paper. Thankfully I’ve never had to stumble across 200 or so dead bodies, but it reminded me the power of expression, even if it’s not out loud to others’ ears.
And he expressed himself in many other ways, one being a talent he found later in life in the nursing homes: painting figurines. He was SO PROUD of his figurines and every time that we’d visit, he’d have them displayed on shelves in his room and tell you about each one. Here he was, a 98-year-old war vet, and he found a passion for painting little objects made for children. I think we sometimes tell ourselves that if we’re not perfect or experts in a hobby then it means we can’t do or enjoy that certain thing. Watching him has made me start to draw again. And he was perfectly content with each figurine he made, whether it had the right colors painted in the right places or not. You could see the passion in his eyes as he talked about his figurines, and it was beautiful.
Before I left for Uruguay I remember my mom telling me, “Go visit your grandpa before you leave.”
I went with my sister, just the two of us. The residents in the home were about to have dinner, promptly in the early afternoon, so the visit was short.
“I’m going to live in Uruguay, Grandpa!” I shouted. (He couldn’t hear very well, even with his hearing aids.)
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there for two years!”
“Oh.” His eyebrows raised a little at that.
“So I’ll see you in two years then. How does that sound?”
“Oh, that’ll be fine.”
And so I hugged him and told him I loved him. Then we left.
And as I was getting into the car I teared up a bit. I’m not sure if my sister saw or not. It felt strange for me. I said goodbye to a lot of people before I left, but my grandpa was the only one that made me want to cry. It’s not like I knew he would die before I left, but when you’re 96, the possibility is there.
And so when my mom called me in February to tell me that he had passed away, I felt at peace with it. I had already said my goodbye. And his passing helped remind me of the humanity we both share, our expression in writing, and finding hobbies we might not be good at but enjoy nonetheless.
Up until he died and even after, I never felt grief for my grandpa; it was for my mom and for not being able to be there to support her. She had cared for him in so many ways in his last years of life, and now I felt I needed to take care of her, thousands of miles away. It wasn’t something I had thought would happen, but it was there, an unexpected blessing of some sort brought upon by his passing.
My grandpa Niemeier died in February.
Ruth died in March.
Diego died in April.
You just can’t predict this stuff, the lives that literally come and go, impacting you along the way and impacting how you care for others. I don’t have enough time or pages to write it all down, but I thinking sharing small pieces of their stories is good enough for now.
I hope it brought you some joy. It’s what they would have wanted.
