New Year’s News

 It’s 2016 and my story has changed in a variety of ways. My departure to Mali has been indefinitely delayed, and having finished all my training I am now work at the State Department’s Africa Bureau in DC. Thus far it has been a great experience. I’m learning about how the DC offices manage things and about the culture of the Foreign Service. The plan for the future changes regularly: maybe I’ll take consular training, or perhaps I’ll get reassigned to somewhere else, or it’s possible I’ll stay in DC until I can go to Mali. Literally, the plan has changed several times already, so I’ve settled into a mood of (mostly) calm and acceptance. What will come, will come. In the meantime, I’m earning a paycheck and spending time with family.

Of far more import, the world has become an emptier place. My grandfather, my dad’s dad, passed away on Friday, January 8, 2016. It was not unexpected. The past two years saw his rapid decline due to dementia; during the last year he was cared for by my uncle, who is a supremely loving, patient, and dedicated man. The whole experience, which I’ve seen from afar except for an annual visit, has been emotional for everyone. To see a loved one go through this type of illness is desperately sad and difficult; and to know that life goes on seems perfectly natural and yet perfectly unfair.

Driven always, it seems to me, by his passions, my grandfather was a veteran and a community organizer, a tree farmer and a father, a writer and a thinker, a lover of words and of nature, and a builder of community. His history is full of the amazing - escape from the nazis as a child; re-settling in the U.S.; building a home in Minnesota; fighting for labor rights; educating and helping and always a focus on the people around him - as well as the not-so-amazing - divorces; alcoholism; a great love for a furry feline. 

My favorite memories of my grandfather, Bob Treuer, are snapshots in my mind:

His belly laugh when someone said something that caught his fancy, followed by true tears of mirth that he would swipe away carefully with his thumb;

His “harrumph” and suspicious, disgruntled, yet ultimately just the tiniest bit proud glare when I put a seven-letter word on a triple word score on the Scrabble board;

His little-boy “nobody can see me” expression when sticking a finger into whatever food he snuck out of the fridge or found on the table;

His letters, which were always typewriter-written and signed by both him and his cat, Einstein;

His land: his tree farm, his home between two small lakes. I’ve taken countless pictures of it, but all I really need to do is think of it and I get the strong sense of the peacefulness and calm that I found whenever I was there;

And finally, I think of family. His children – my dad and uncles and aunt – and his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and beyond; cousins and friends and people he’s touched.

But what I’ll remember most is simply that he was my grandfather, and that I loved him, and that he loved me. His smile, his laugh, and the faraway look he’d get now and again.  I miss him already.