katharina

I know this is supposed to be an art blog, and so it will be again one day, but in the meantime, please indulge my sentimentality. On Sunday this week we saw the end of an era and I've been thinking about it ever since. That was the day we visited my husband's grandmother for the first time in her new home, a nursing home not far from the house she lived in for 65 years. During that time she slept under a different roof only a handful of times, and was always relieved to get home so I've been worried about how she's adapting, though her attitude has always been the best.

During the thirty years of her life before moving into the little wooden house she helped her husband build around 1940, Grandma's life was difficult and transient. She was born in a Mennonite community in Ukraine in 1910 and was raised speaking Low German. She retains her accent to this day, though she's lived in Canada for most of her life. The Russian Revolution saw her forced from her home with her parents and younger siblings (seen in this photo many years later) in the early twenties, living in refugee camps in Germany and England over a total of four years. In the English camp she met Abe, who would later become her husband. They landed in Saskatchewan and the next years were spent working as migrant farm labourers to pay their government debts. The family moved slowly west until they ended up in Chilliwack, British Columbia. It was there that she married Abe and gave birth to their first son, my husband's father. Abe managed to get work at a Macmillan-Bloedel lumber mill in Vancouver, Mac-Blo being a huge employer at the time. They bought a city lot and lived in a shed, Grandma giving birth to her third child in that same shed, while building their house. These were small people, Abe being among the tall ones at 5'3", and the house was built on their scale. Grandma, the shortest, has been looking up at my overgrown boys from her height of maybe 4'7" for years, declaring "they're almost as tall as me!"

Life was easier after that. Grandma devoted her life to her family and her religious work, and by the late 1970s, when her husband died, she was the matriarch and would cram everyone into that little house for every holiday gathering. If it was summer, and there were too many, they would eat outside, like at her parents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1959 which was also her and Abe's 25th (Grandma and Abe are up front):

Her energy and work ethic are an inspiration to me, and had our second child been a girl we probably would've named her Katharina, after Grandma. Up until she was 90 she'd do errands and shopping for her 'elderly neighbours', some of whom were 20 years her junior. Here she is with my husband and his younger brother in the late sixties:

The only real physical impediment she's ever had is early hearing loss, but even now, as she rolls toward her 96th birthday, she's still as strong as a tree... well, maybe a tree stump. But in the last year she has started suffering from dementia until it was so bad in January that it was time to make a change. Now that she's in care, my husband visits her as often as he can on his way home from work (and it's always like the first time! :) because her deafness and memory loss leave her feeling really isolated, but still she laughs and looks for ways to help the other inmates.