Honoring My Grandmother: Gratitude In The Second Generation
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
This is our first year with our little boy, so as the calendar recently turned to February and I am easing into preparations for Valentine’s Day, I am naturally having him “help” me make darling fingerprint-heart cards for his loved ones. One for daddy, one for each set of grandparents, and one for his only surviving great-grandparent, my mom’s mom, Hilde. Her birthday is the day before Valentine’s Day, and this year she will be turning 98 — an astounding number — so we add a “happy birthday” to the “I love you’s” on her card.
Each year around this time I find myself reflecting on her life with gratitude. Born in 1925 in what was then Yugoslavia, my grandma Hilde grew up in a hardworking and well-off family which owned farmlands, vineyards and a mill business in her ethnic-German community in the village of Beschka. Of course, things were not always easy — she had one sibling die shortly after birth, another at age 10, and another sibling born with disabilities — but they had a good life and were well-respected by friends and neighbors.
World War II began when she was a teenager, and it changed absolutely everything. The Soviet Union ended up taking over Yugoslavia, including every farm, mill, and any other productive property. My grandmother and her family lost everything that they had, and my grandmother, an orphan at this point, had to flee Yugoslavia with her three sisters and two friends with nothing but a suitcase and the clothes on her back. She was lucky to escape with her life — her elderly family members who weren’t able to leave were killed in communist extermination camps for the crime of being ethnically German.
After some time in Austria and Germany, my grandma made it to the U.S. in 1951 as a war refugee. She started her life over in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, meeting other German speakers and refugees, including her husband, my grandpa Adam. Together they raised their four children, improving their English through their children when they began attending school. They both had to work, sometimes more than one job, to make ends meet and to provide the possibility of a future for their children.
Now, many years later, I can only try to imagine what it was like to make those sacrifices and to go through such hardship. But because she did, and because my grandpa did, I am so incredibly blessed.
My grandma’s perseverance, grounded in her strong Christian faith, led to my own mother’s opportunities to make a life in an unprecedentedly free country where within one or two generations, a family can go from having nothing to having plenty.
And now here I am, writing while rocking my baby for a nap, and able to think about things like my next album as a singer/songwriter, the organic food I feed my baby, and the cute cards I want to make for a somewhat frivolous but well-intentioned midwinter holiday.
I am so grateful for the life that my grandmother’s sacrifices and her faith have made possible for me, and I try to come back to that reflection as often as I can. If I am lucky, and put my heart and soul into it, maybe in some small or large ways I can model that same spirit for my own children, and be a blessing for the generations yet to come. I see that as the responsibility her legacy gives me and my own generation.
I’ll leave you with a quote from one of her favorite hymns that reflects her own experiences and resilience:
“All the way my savior leads me,
Cheers each winding path I tread,
Gives me grace for every trial,
Feeds me with the living bread.
Though my weary steps may falter,
And my soul a-thirst may be,
Gushing from the Rock before me,
Lo! A spring of joy I see;
Gushing from the Rock before me,
Lo! A spring of joy I see.”
— All The Way My Savior Leads Me
