Going to my mother’s grave on saturday for the all saints day turned out to be, once again, a release of no small amounts of tears and emotions. This year it’ll be 16 years ago since she passed away. What’s weird is that before I had kids, I “handled it” (used in its most relative way here) differently than from what I do today.
After having cleared away leaves and put some fresh candles on my mother’s family grave, I was watching how Alexander and Filip were running around, like kids do, so completely unaware of where they where or why they were there. And watching them in this context is precisely the “problem”. It saddens me to think that Katti (my mother’s nickname) never got to see them and vice versa. I called Alexander and Filip over to the grave and talked to them a little bit about who she was and how she was; Filip suddenly announced that he felt sad because he didn’t get to see her, after which I more or less lost it (also used in a relative manner). I realize this is not a failure on anyone’s part, but one tends to want to provide for your children, and not being able to present a living grandmother on my side of the family irritates the shit out of me 🙂 Alexander started freezing up when he felt and saw my state of emotions, so I told him Katti would have liked to see him play football and do other things that he does.
With the snow that was on the ground, both Filip and Alexander managed to make something that looked like a snowman, so we decided to place their snowmen on each side of the tombstone.
Man, breathing sometimes gets to be an effort. When I see my children in this context, I feel so helpless.
Explaining how their grandmother was, mind their age is close to seven and almost 3 1/2, would probably be hard if they didn’t have an example they could relate to; here comes Astrid Lindgren (the author of “Pippi“, “Emil“, and many other childhood favorites to millions of children and grown-ups all over the world) to the rescue.
And it is a really suitable comparison, my mom was like Pippi Longstocking, but in a grown-up body 🙂