My Oma Klaue, 1912-2011.

Yesterday we buried my last grandparent, my Oma Klaue. It would have been her 99th birthday.

I wrote a blog entry about her a few years ago. It still pretty much summarizes any eulogizing I could do at this point:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2007/09/heritage-days-oma-klaue.html

A month ago we buried her older sister, my Great-Aunt Gertrud, who died at the age of 104. I also wrote about her a few years ago:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2008/01/heritage-days-great-aunt-gertrud.html

I would like to be able to offer more of a retrospect on their lives, but I don't think I am able to. I don't know much more about their biographies than what I wrote in those entries.

I sort of grew up without grandparents. I mean, three of my four grandparents were alive throughout my childhood and into adulthood, but I never found them to be "present" in any large degree. I can't blame it on them; it was simply that we were geographically removed, and even though we visited every few years and corresponded regularly via letter-writing, it never really developed into a deep relationship. Oma Klaue was always very generous and giving, but our worlds didn't overlap much. As an adult, I lived in her vicinity for a few years and during that time I visited her regularly, but even then it always felt more like a polite conversation with a hospitable neighbor than a deep participation with the life of a close family member.

And now that she's gone, I'm not even experiencing a strong sense of loss. Her passing is not unexpected (again, she was in her late nineties) and her mind had already been spending the last months drifting away from this world. Lately she would forget who we were, and the conversations we would have would be set on a "repeat" loop every couple of minutes, because she had already forgotten what we had talked about five minutes before.

What I am experiencing is a vague feeling of missed opportunity -- that this person who walked the earth for practically a century must have been such a treasure-house of stories and wisdom, and that I never really found access to that. But to be honest, I think she herself didn't have access to much of it either. Even before her mind started going, she didn't talk much about her past and seemed to have forgotten a lot of it.

All the same, there are people who knew her much better than I, her grandson, did. What we all know is that she was generous and that she was a good listener. Many of the more "difficult" people in her environment found her to be a safe person to be around. There was D., an epileptic who talked endlessly and was a strain to most social events; Mrs. R., a disturbed elderly woman who carried a rag doll wherever she went; Mrs. W., one of those demanding old women who abuse everyone until they eventually die estranged and unmourned. All these people regularly visited my grandmother for decades, and she would make coffee for them and listen to them for hours. Outside observers would occasionally comment on the incongruity of my grandmother (who was a woman of "good breeding and manners") spending so much time with the neighborhood "low-lifes", but I think she never perceived it like that.

This affinity to the socially awkward is one thing we all know ABOUT her, but I sort of wish I had gotten to know HER better. I know there are people who knew her better than I did, but I sometimes wonder how well even they knew her. I caught glimpses of what interested her, of what frightened her, of what doubts and convictions she had, of what sort of personality she was and how she made you feel. But just like I couldn't talk to her much about the things that fascinated me (music, for instance), I feel that I she couldn't really talk to me about many of the things that occupied her mind and her life. I'm sure that I would have gotten to know her much better had I not grown up an ocean away, but I'm not sure how well I would have gotten to know her.

Another thing I'm experiencing -- and this is a little less expected -- is a sort of feeling of uprootedness.

Obviously, that's one I should long be accustomed to by now. Growing up between different cultures, in a series of highly transitory contexts, estranged from my fatherland and a foreigner everywhere else, "uprootedness" has been pretty much the one constant in my life. But in spite of everything, my "short answer" to the "where are you from?" question has always been, "I'm German." I've never been a very good German -- I have a feeble grasp of the geography, history, political structure, or pop culture of Germany, and I haven't lived there long enough to have set very deep roots -- but good German or bad German, I've always felt German. German is the language I pray in. Germany is the country I support in the World Cup. German is what my passport says I am. Germany is the country that I can still go to and know that they won't kick me out or let me starve in the streets, like practically any other country would have a right to do to me if it came to that. All these things have always made Germany my "home".

But what I realized yesterday, as we carried my grandmother's ashes through the cemetery through which, in recent years, I often wheeled her in her wheelchair, is that she was also one of the reasons I am German. With her death I've just lost another link to my past, to my identity, and to my heritage. For decades, she was our only family member actually living in the "fatherland". She sent us books and cassette tapes (and later CDs) of German stories and songs, and thus kept much of our cultural heritage alive. She was the reason why German politics should matter to us at all (since she was the only one in our family who would be affected by the decisions made in the German government), and why German history should be relevant to us (since it was an integral part of her life experience). She was one of the few reasons we even bothered to visit Germany, and why some of us stayed there to live for a few years.

With my Oma's passing, Germany is suddenly starting to feel a bit like that part of town you used to visit regularly when you still had a good friend living there, but which you haven't visited since your friend moved away. After the funeral ceremony we had a meal with friends and family, and we had it in the nursing home where she spent the last decade of her life, and I was overcome with the melancholic thought that I'll never really have a reason to enter that building again. And then I realized how much of my reason for entering the COUNTRY wasn't there any more.

Of course, my Oma was not by any means the ONLY reason I would have to visit Germany. My parents live there as well (and have been living there for the last decade), and I do have friends and relatives scattered through that country. But my parents and relatives are almost as uprooted and nomadic as I am, and my friends there don't go back that many years. It's now that my Oma is gone that I realize she's been a lifelong presence reminding me of where I came from.