A sudden turn

Sunday evening I received the sad news that my grand mother had been hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. Since noone knew the status or where it was going my parents recommended that I should still go to Kenya as planned the next morning.

Monday morning I met with the team at Lausanne train station and we went together to the airport in Geneva. After having checked in we received news that the situation with my grand mother had worsened, so instead of getting on the plane to Nairobi, I got on one in the opposite direction, back to Denmark.

My Mom and my youngest sister, Helene, were already there when I arrived at the hospital. My other sister Anne arrived later in the evening and today my brother came by train. All of them live in the other end of the country. It has been a couple of tough - but at the same time good - days. Tough, because of the gravity of the situation, but also good as the family very quickly came together. Not that I doubted that it would, it just warmed to see it happen as it always has.

My grand mother appears to have stabilized physically now, but other than that we seem to have lost her. She is no longer able to speak and only in a short glimse from time to time does she seem to recognize us. The old, calm and clever eyes are still there, but they will probably never again tell the stories they used to. My grand mother was born in 1920 and has lived a long life with three children, a 62-year marriage with my grand dad and an incredible amount of friends. It is a tired and happy old woman who says her goodbyes.

The last couple of years she has told us a lot of stories from a time we have never really known: About how it was to be a child in a small provincial town in Denmark in the 1930s and how it was to be a young couple in Copenhagen during World War II, sitting out some of the coldest winters in recent Danish history in an unheated apartment and in a society where everything was in short supply. We loose so much when these people leave us, yet we forget to ask or to listen when we still have them.

I will spare you a long philosofical tailspin on the meaning of life and death, although I have done quite some thinking on the subject the last two days. Let us just remind ourselves that we must live our lives in a way so that when we one day are taking our last breaths, then our loved ones will gather around our bed, sad because we are leaving, but also happy because we got the most out of our life. Do not wait until you loose someone to get an overdose of this realization, but make it a small part of your everyday life.

Thorsten