Grief is a strange feeling to encounter. No description i have ever read of it makes sense to me now that it is a new companion. It’s so quiet, still so persistent, you hardly notice it until you feel its presence as if someone slowly started dimming the light and suddenly you are fully immersed in a dusk.
My granddad died at a respectable age of 94 years and without suffering leading up to that. It was a life and a passing that most would describe as a blessing and still for all of us that are left behind it was a total shock. The day before he died he still drove his car, cleaned the windows, wrote a few e-mails, made some visits.
In my mind I go back. I step into the hallway, he greets me with a handshake. The tiles in the hallway are white, red and black, like a weird chessboard. As kids we tried to make it all the way to the door without stepping on a black tile - it seemed like an impossible task back then.
I come into the living room and sit down on the limegreen velvet sofa. It is the strangest fabric I have ever encountered. It is soft and smooth if you stroke it in the direction the fibres lie, if you stroke it the other way it is prickly and bristle; I imagine this is what the skin of otters feels like. We go through a ritualistic conversation:
Do you want something to drink?
Yes, tea would be nice.
Okay, I will make some, but it will take a minute.
He goes to the large cabinet that is filled with books, but in one corner there is a selection of DVDs. The Bourne Ultimatum is the only DVD that I remember, what a strange choice for a man in his nineties. He bends down to get two wide, shallow, thin-walled tea cups from behind a sliding door at the bottom of the cupboard. The cups are white with blue delicate florals. He places them on the table with care, goes round the other side of the room to go to a smaller cabinet to get the large, bulbous tea pot that is matching the cups.
I feel bad for making so much effort for someone who was literally born in 1930 but I can feel that he enjoys the ceremonial aspect of our meeting as much as I do.
He leaves for the kitchen. I look around the room. I try to take it all in - now in retrospect. The secretary desk with the inbuilt light across the room. A picture my cousin painted with black and purple swirls. My grandmas collection of books of fairytales from different cultures. The Süddeutsche Zeitung is lying on the table. My grandfather used to do the Süddeutsche crossword puzzle every day, but he never won anything he told me. He comes back from the kitchen and pours me a cup of tea. It is an Oolong or a Ceylon tea or something similarly fancy-sounding. It is the best tea I have ever had. It was consistent every time as well. It is so smooth, almost sweet, nothing like the bitter black teas I regularly make for myself - this tea seems to hold a secret I never dared to ask about. I try not to gulp it down but it is delightful. We sit there in silence for a few moments, before he asks me about my life, about my job, about Vienna - the city he grew up in and that he had to leave as a teenager.
You never understand what a good listener is, until you grow up and realise there is only a few of them in this world. There is few people who actually listen to what you are saying and if you meet them you suddenly realise you actually have to think about the things you say as well. There is a feeling of inadequacy to just talk in empty phrases when you meet someone who actually listens.
So to not feel inadequate in answering I start asking questions. About his many trips, about his early years in the Bavarian alps as a young man from Vienna (a place that might as well be as exotic as the south of Argentina in a region like that.) And I wait for my favourite story. The journey of a lifetime. I listen to him talk about how he took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Budapest to China, crossing through Russia, with his friend in a time when the Iron Curtain still was a real threat as well as a real physical obstacle you needed to overcome. I hear about how he bribed a train conductor to bring them vodka and caviar to their cabin in exchange for some western magazines. I hear how they traveled China partly on their bikes. How they tried to eat slippery mushrooms with chopsticks, mostly failing but exclaiming “Haut hin!” every time they did succeed. It feels like a story from a long forgotten time, but told with a liveliness that all you want to do is to hop on the next train to experience the same kind of wondrous adventure yourself.
I only new my granddad as a calm, pragmatic person but sincere and with a subtle kindness that was not compensating or coming from a place of wanting to please. In the last years of his life he started to write down the stories from his many traveling adventures, inspired by his partner later in life, his old sweetheart from his late teenage years. I am so grateful to have all these stories now. I read them and take myself back onto the lime-green sofa. I remember all the times we sat there. A soft, calm and unexcited kind of ritual, but now that it is a ritual I can no longer replicate I long for it.
Stay soft, stay calm, hold onto the memories and share the small human moments between one another. We must be careful of each other, we must be kind - while there is still time.
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