With those falling leaves and pouring rain, nostalgia lurks around the corner and memories to ‘times gone by’ easily come to the fore. But how much stronger would it even feel if you have lived more than 80 years, columnist Paula Dubbink ponders.
This week my grandmother celebrated her 85th birthday. The Swedes phrase that nicely. She will fill 85, they say here.
A good way of putting it, I think. My grandmother has after all really filled 85 years on this earth with her presence. She has filled them with growing up, becoming a social worker, marrying, continuing to work as a married woman (quite revolutionary at the time), giving birth to three children, getting back to work when the children had grown up and eventually retiring.
Until his death last year, my grandfather and she filled each other’s lives for over sixty years. In my memory they did that inexhaustibly, traveling throughout the country to be at every birthday party, musical or church service they could, but also visiting European cities and even Australia.
How can a person live with memories of so many years?
The illnesses, the dear ones dying, the mistakes made, the times being disappointed – well, I guess we all have our lists. But imagine how long that list will have become by the time we’re only a lustrum away from our nineties?
And even all the nice parts of life, which hopefully exceed the bad parts: the parties, the weddings, the friends, the travels, the movies seen, the books read, the news events watched, the elections voted in, the moments of loving and being loved. The life lived, the days filled in 85 years. One looks back in happiness, I presume. But how does one deal with the fact that it’s all, well, gone? It already happened, after all. And it won’t be repeated.
It must have to do with my highly overdeveloped sense for nostalgia in combination with the falling leaves and the drizzling weather, but cycling through Lund can at times make me feel the weight of memories, in spite of my mere 25 filled years.
There in front of Coop, me and a friend ate fast food on a summer night and discussed life. But she has returned home over a year ago and we haven’t been in touch in ages. Masses of memories are located at the theological library – but it closed recently and we moved to LUX. Cycling over the Northern graveyard, which seems to breathe ‘memory’ with a sad voice, the feeling becomes the strongest. Once this was my way home in this new city, this foreign country. Now I don’t live there anymore. The corridor is inhabited by other people and most of my corridor mates have left Sweden long ago. It has all become the past.
Fortunately, my grandma is not a sentimental wreck like me. She just continues to fill lives. Her own, but also that of her grandchildren. With her presence, her presents and her countless cards to me, immediately demanding my new address when I move. And whenever I come for a visit, she always fills my wallet with more money (“to pay for your travels”) than the train ticket ever cost.
I hope she will fill many more years.
