I’ve always been close to my grandmother. I think I was closer to my grandfather when I was very small, but as soon as I came into my teens, I grew closer to her.

This is difficult, because I had to write a post like this about my grandfather once, and I remember what happened afterwards.

My grandpa was a proud man. He fought in WWII, not because he agreed with the government, but because he wanted to protect his country. When his regiment was taken to a new assignment by plane, he talked to one of the commanding officers or a pilot, I don’t quite remember – they recognised each other’s dialects and talked about home. He was offered to fly with that man on the plane that was going to fly in the middle, escorted by a number of other planes. The weapons and other materials were in the centre plane, surrounded by planes carrying soldiers. The soldiers were more expendable. The centre plane was the only one that got through.

He was taken prisoner in Africa, where he and his comrades were kept under barbed wire in the blazing sun. It was fastened so low they couldn’t sit up. There are pictures of him plucking cotton in the USA, where he spent five years as a PoW.

He married my grandmother and took care of her mother until she died at 97. He was a weaver, and was so involved in the union that he became the president of the country’s textil union in the end. My mom describes him as very conservative and correct, but also generous.

He was a great grandfather anyway. My favourite thing to remember is Saturday mornings during elementary school. Mine was about the last grade that had school every other Saturday. On the Saturdays I was free, often my grandfather would come over during breakfast. He’d sit on the corner of the bench, where he’s always been sitting when he was at our place. After breakfast, he would take me somewhere cool, on the back of his bicycle or in the car. The small airport was only used privately then, and the main attraction was a big (or so it seemed at six years old ;) ) playground. There was a carousel, I remember, and swings, and a little wooden house one climbed up to, to sit on a plastic seat that was connected to a horizontal rope, so one could glide over the entire playground.

That’s how I choose to remember him. He wasn’t doing well when he was around 70 years old, but he blazed through bypass-surgery – the surgeons said they hadn’t seen anyone his age recover this quickly before – and had some very good years after that. He and my grandmother travelled a lot. They hadn’t been able to go away for many years since my great grandmother couldn’t be left alone, and now they finally did. We used to joke that it’d be less work to note in the calendar when they were actually home.

When he was around 80 years old, he started to dwindle away. There was less of him every time I spoke to him or saw him. He died of pneumonia caused by his dementia. The worst for me was when I Talked to my godmother a few months afterwards, and she told me how abysmal the care he received towards the end was, how she was laughed at when she asked for painkillers for him, how this man, whose pain threshold was so high it was non-existant (he didn’t need any anesthetic for root canals, he said he didn’t have any pain after the bypass surgery – not to act the hero, but because he honestly didn’t) – he was screaming to the Virgin Mary and begging to die. For months afterwards, I wasn’t able to talk about this to anyone, it is just too awful to think about.

Popularity: 43% [?]