Personal: February 2007 Archives

For those of you looking for knitting content, I'll warn you right up front that there is no knitting content to be found here today. It will be back tomorrow. Today I need to write about something else. For the past several days, knitting has not really been front and center in my head.

John's brother put it best: This weekend seemed like it went by an an instant and took an eternity.

And so it did.

John's family is Polish. To be more descriptive, they are Goral*, or Highlanders. When John is in a joking mood, he says that translates roughly what Americans would understand as "hillbilly". But that is really not a fair comparison. Goral are better described as a people of the mountains: strong, fiercely independent, deeply religious, very traditional. In many ways they are the keepers of the faith in ways that go far beyond just attending to their churches.

I am 3rd generation Lithuanian. That translates to an American who understands that the fact that she has an "as" ending on her last name associates her with a group of people in eastern Europe. I speak no Lithuanian, have no connections to Chicago's Lithuanian community, understand almost no Lithuanian traditions. This is how my family wanted my generation to be. When they came to the US in the early 20th century, there were many good reasons not to be identified as an eastern European immigrant. When any of us asked my grandmother to teach us some Lithuanian, she would always say, Why? You are American. You should speak English. And aside from eating some traditional food (kugeli, anyone?) and celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve I know very little of what makes someone Lithuanian. American is what I am. A little bit of everything, a cultural tradition that is always in flux, from a country that still doesn't entirely know what it's identity really is.

It's the rituals in our lives that begin to teach us who we really are. When John and I got married, I was insistant that our wedding not reflect only Polish tradition. It caused a lot of conflict because where John comes from, tradition is so strong. And if you met John at work or at a party, you might think he is Polish the way I am Lithuanian. His tradition is important to him, but he grew up here, surrounded by both Polish and American culture. I wanted our wedding to reflect us. At that time, I thought of "us" as very American. And I still do. But John very much lives and participates in two worlds. I was intrigued by his family traditions but didn't understand them very well, and, to be honest, was a little afraid of them. They seemed like the sort of thing where one could lose one's own identity. And I didn't really want to do that.

Nonetheless, our wedding was marked by the religious ceremonies, the traditional music and musicians and a good deal of Polish food. At John's parents house we received a traditional blessing for our marriage from our parents. When the Goral musicians (essentially a Polish string quartet) started to play the traditional music for the occasion, I started to cry. It was something that just overwhelmed me. The music hit me in a very deep place. As we were walking out the door from John's parents house on the way to the church, a woman who is one of John's close family friends took my hands, Ah Theresa, now you are goralka.

By marrying John, I married into a lot of tradition. Most of which I still don't understand, and, I am sorry to say, a good deal of which I have resisted because of my strong personal discomfort with the religious component of it. It is a selfish thing on my part. After almost 9 years, I am getting better understanding, but I still opt out of a number of things when I can.

This weekend was a growing up experience for me. When the person you care about most in the world loses his father, opting out of things that scare you is not an option. In fact, it does not even cross your mind. I stood next to him at the front of the funeral home chapel for the visitation. I greeted and hugged people who had come to pay their respects to his father and his family for 6 hours. I got choked up when the people from "Klub Ludzmierz" said special prayers and sang traditional songs to honor my father-in-law's passing. I was there when the funeral director closed the coffin lid. I walked behind the coffin into the church. I placed a rose on the coffin at the cemetary and touched the coffin with a final Good-bye before it was lowered into the ground as those who had come with us sang a final song and said prayers.

It was one of the most emotionally wrenching and deeply moving things that I have been a part of. It was a priviledge to be able to stand next to my husband and his family and participate in a sad but important tradition.

When we went back to the funeral home to collect the flowers and few other things that still remained there, the funeral director and I were talking a bit as we moved flowers closer to the door where John and his brother were loading them into the car. He said to me, I hear from your husband, you're Lithuanian. When I first saw you, I thought for sure you must be Polish.

I think, perhaps now, I have earned a bit of the honor of being a goralka.

Rest in peace, Tat. We'll miss you.

* to anyone out there who speaks Polish better than I do, I apoligize in advance for all the incorrect spelling of Polish words that may show up in this post. My understanding of the Polish language is minimal by anyone's definition.

There are a lot of posts that I go back and forth on. Sometimes it's because I don't know if what I am going to talk about is interesting enough. Sometimes it's because some topics are too personal for the internet. Sometimes it's because the situation isn't really mine and I don't know whether it's right for me to be doing any talking.

Today I find myself in the same position. I've spent most of the last day trying to decide whether this post would be about my difficulties sizing the fish mittens (not pattern related difficulties, just personal decision and ripping related difficulties) or about a sad family event going on right now around me. In the end, I've opted for the family event, because I really haven't been able to focuse that much on thinking too hard about knitting.

You see, on Wednesday evening, just as John and I were about to sit down at a our date night restaurant table, John got a call from his mother. His father had passed away suddenly during the afternoon. In an instant, what had been a nice day that was going to be capped with a nice dinner, changed completely. We left without sitting down. Since that time, John has been dealing with the realities of his father's passage.

I'm not going to say too much about John's dad. Like all people, he was a complex, multi-faceted individual, and because my Polish is limited to food vocabulary and his English was not very deep either, I knew him in a very shallow way. He was deeply religious, missed farming, and loved his grandchildren. He always took the time to ask after my family when I was over to visit. When he could, he liked to raise bunnies and tend to his summer garden. We were glad that John had talked to him just yesterday and and that he had recently had a chance to go back to Poland and that we'd shared some nice Christmas holidays together.

But this really got me thinking about expectations and how easy it is to delay reaching out to other people in our families because we think we're always going to have another day. Or dropping my husband off at the train station and not kissing him good bye because I was irritated about something minor we were discussing in the car. Or not staying in touch with a friend because I have too much work to do. It's so easy to forget that something that can change your life forever can happen only in a few seconds and you might never get the chance to do something that you meant to do.

So I wanted to use this post to encourage everyone out there to stop and look at the people in your life. Call up a parent or a sibling that you haven't talked to in a while, even if you don't have a reason. Be sure to part ways from your spouse or partner or children in the morning in a positive way. Look up an old friend and send them an email and let them know you're still thinking about them.

Peace to all of you this weekend. May you be happy and have the warmth of the people you care about around you.