Oral History

Something happens when family gathers together.  It is something that is magical and draws family closer together, uniting them in a shared bond.  It is the act of telling stories, of remembering events that have transpired and sharing them with each other.  These stories act both as a glue to re-enforce family bonds and as a reminder to how we all made it to where we are today.  The unique stories that happen to each individual are compounded by the other stories shared by other family members.  We all have a unique set of stories that are sacred to us and involve certain members of our extended family, but once the stories start to coalesce, they begin to create a deeper oral history that ties together all the tangential experiences that we have had separately.  To me, the most powerful time that I have experienced oral history being created is at the funeral of a loved one.  During that time, we begin by coming together to remember the life of a loved one that as passed.  The stories begin about that person, how they shaped our own individual lives, and we begin to realize what an integral part they played in a family reaching the point it is at today.  In almost every scenario, once a family members stories a taken separately and shared together, we begin to see the common thread that unites us all.  But it doesn't end there.  There is a natural progression that happens as those stories are told, we begin to move from the past to the present and we begin to share more in depth with each other the events that are currently shaping our own lives.  We begin to share the intimate details of our children, our loved ones, our careers, and our homes.  And when those stories come forth, they as well harken back to the threads that were cemented in the past by our deceased loved one.  

As those who are reading this are probably aware, I just went through a funeral and small family gathering this past weekend as we buried my Baba, my grandmother.  There was one story in particular that was shared over the weekend by my cousin that sort of struck all of us.  It is a story that you might hear in a novel or war movie, but it is one that happened to my family years ago during World War II.  My Baba and my aunt were living in Austria at the time, waiting in a long line to buy bread at a store.  While in that line, my aunt, a child of 3 or 4, saw a doll in the window across the street from where they were standing in line.  She began pestering my grandmother about that doll saying she really needed it.  Baba attempted to put the issue to rest, trying ever different angle to either make her forget about the doll or convince her that they couldn't by it because they really needed to get the bread instead.  Both my aunt and Baba being stubborn and bullheaded, neither relented about their separate issue; bread or doll, bread or doll.  After what I can imagine was probably about ten minutes, my aunt pestered Baba enough that she relented, got out of the line that they had been standing in for a long time, and took her across the street to get the doll.  This was no small admittance on my Baba's part.  It would mean getting in the back of the line and waiting even longer to get the bread they had been waiting for.  As they were in the store buying the doll, a bomb was dropped, it landed across the street from them where they had been standing in line, and left a crater in the ground.  If it hadn't been for that doll perched just right in a shop window, I would not be here today, my parents wouldn't be here, my cousin and his family wouldn't be here.  To put it simply, our family line would have ended back in the 1940's in war torn Austria.  It struck home for me as to how lucky I am that may aunt was as stubborn and unrelenting as she was.  

While not every family history has this type of story in it, every family has stories that illustrate how their own families got to where they are today.  Every family history is peppered with little idiosyncrasies, stories of a decision made at a fork in the road, of a loved one who survived an ordeal and persevered in the face of adversity.  The act of storytelling is an act of remembering and I feel it is vitally important to cement in our minds our own unique history so that we can share it with future generations.  As I was standing with my cousin on the sidewalk outside the church after funeral, we were talking about how lucky we are that Baba kept on getting up when life knocked her down and provided us with the opportunity to live such excellent lives in the United States.  She moved from the Ukraine to Austria to Chile to the States, each move fraught with unknowns.  Yet she did it.  Then we were joking about our lives and the impact we had on our future generations.  What "great" decisions did we make in our own lives that would shape our children and our grandchildren's lives.  The fact is, we will probably never know.  And our children and grandchildren will never know unless we share with them our own stories, the little nuances of our lives, the decisions we made.  It will be up to them to piece together their own narrative history of how they got to where they are.  But one thing is for sure, every decision we make now will have a lasting impact in one way or another on future generations.  We don't know what impact it will be, but we must remember and more importantly remember to share. 

Eulogy for Baba

Life is a study of opposites and human yearning to find a balance between them, to find that solid middle road and never fall off of it.  Yet that road is slippery, too narrow, too hard to navigate without  God’s love  to show us the way.  From the joys of holding a newborn baby or dancing your heart out till the last note fades away at a family wedding, to the sadness of whispering “I love you” one last time into your dying grandmother’s ear, we have all experienced, in one way or another, the polar opposites that life hands us and asks us to make sense of, to live in, and to take away something from each experience upon which we can build a better life for us and those around us.  In many instances, especially those in which life turns on a dime, we need the help of God.  Baba was no stranger to God.  She held him close throughout her life, and while she wasn’t perfect, as none of us are, she used her faith as the bedrock upon which to continue living through every hardship she encountered.  So who was Baba?

Baba was a woman who was born half a world away in a time without TV’s or cars under the auspices of a controlling communist government.  She was no stranger to hardship.  At the age of 24, with her parents and a 2 year old daughter, my aunt, she fled her childhood home to escape the oppression that World War 2 would come to embody.  She was a refugee, a single mom whose first husband (according to her) was blown up on a train.  She settled in Austria and lived there for about 6 years before leaving again in search of a better life, this time, as an immigrant.  She traveled with her family to Chile where she settled in Santiago, set up a business as a seamstress and embroiderer, met my grandfather, and gave birth to my mom.  Life went on, settling into a rhythm that no one hoped would be disrupted.  But that was not to be.  In 1964, a socialist government was on the verge of  taking over and having witnessed first hand the hardships that were imposed upon them under a similar government, she once again packed up and left with her now larger family.  However, she left her parents behind.  She settled with her family in Bridgeport, Connecticut hoping this would be her last drastic move.  Yet tragedy, for whatever reason, continued to follow her and my grandfather died suddenly less than a decade  later.  She persisted, never giving in or giving up.  Did she struggle?  Absolutely.  Who wouldn’t struggle having been through what she did.  Yet her trials were not over.  In the late 1980’s, she met another wonderful man, married, and moved to North Carolina.   A few years later, he came down with cancer and also died.  She survived three husbands and that was enough for her.  She then moved to Florida where she bounced around a bit.  She hoped that tragedy had moved on from her.  Once again, this was not to be.  Ten years ago, her first daughter Dina, my aunt, passed away.

This was Baba’s life of hardships.  I see no reason why she should have made it through so much without one thing driving her on, her faith in God.  How she cultivated that faith in a country that prohibited religion, I can not fathom.  I can only surmise that it started when she was a young girl in her family’s garden.  Throughout all the hardships she endured, there were certain things she persistently retreated to when life played hardball, her love of family and dancing, her flowers, and her opera.  She saw God’s perfection in the flowers of her family’s garden that bloomed year after year and her love of opera managed to sustain her.  Both the flowers and the opera allowed her to be in the present, to live in the moment, and not worry about the past or the future.  In essence, it allowed to her to be still and to be loved.  It gave her respite in the storm of her life, respite from worry for her family, and it gave her the strength she needed to get up every time life knocked her down and carry on.  This doesn’t mean she was perfect by any means, her heart had been hurt many times over, probably many more times than most of us will ever have to endure, but she carried on.  Because of the many pains and hardships she endured, she developed thorns around her heart, thorns that she viewed as a protective shield to try and prevent her from being hurt even more.  Because of these thorns around her heart, she frequently became a thorn in the side of many people,  needling and pricking many whom she encountered, including the young police officer in Florida whom she chastised for pulling her over one time.  (By the end of that encounter, he ended up letting her go with a warning.) Yet, for all the thorns she grew, it wasn’t due to a lack of love, rather, it was only an  effort on her part to protect against more pain and suffering; an effort to protect her own heart.  She loved her family through her brokenness to the fullest extent that she could.  One has to merely look at the many pictures of her to  see the joy and love emanating from her gentle face.


But Baba, like life itself, was a study in opposites.  For every jab of a thorn she made, whether family member, friend, or stranger; there was a rose petal held delicately behind it, yearning to be noticed, to be loved, to be caressed by a gentle hand.  She was that last flower on the rose bush when all the others had faded and fallen, nestled in the middle, surrounded by a protective shield of thorns that very few people could reach; but almost all, if they spent the time sitting and watching, could tease out the beautiful contours of every petal undulating out from a perfect center.  Many of those she knew yearned to reach that inner sanctum, to hold that flower, learn its intricacies, and be able to love it more.  But for most of us, we could only watch the flower and receive its love, unable to love fully in return.  The love that she gave comforted many a family member and friend.  Her laughter at the joys of life and the smile that grew from the depths of her soul spread to those around her.  I firmly believe that without her faith in God, a faith sustained through God’s touch in nature, and the music which created a harmony on the strings of her soul, we would not have been able to witness such a beautiful woman persist in life, get up continuously, and carry on.  She taught many through her actions how to find peace in life and to live in the present.  To see the smile that erupted on her face when a child was in her presence was to see the love of God shining through her.  To watch her tend her garden was to see a woman at peace.  Those are the lessons she shared with those around her, to those who sat and watched the beautiful rose that she was.  And while we shed tears now over losing a loved one, I think we can all find comfort in the fact that the thorns she grew around her are now being removed by God, one by one, allowing her undying love to continue its presence within us.

If Baba could teach us one last thing, I think it would be this; to take time every day to stop and smell the flowers.  Let us not mourn too long for Baba for her hardships are now over and God is tending the garden of her soul.  Instead, let us carry with us her spirit and love of life.  She wanted those around her to be perfect and while none of us ever will be, if we allow God’s love to work through us, we may just be able to inch our way a little closer, allowing ourselves to love those around us more deeply, to fill in those gaps that Baba never could.  Let us learn from Baba and not put thorns around our own hearts, but instead allow God to start removing them now.  Let us dance to the music of life as Baba danced and reveled in the music she loved.  Let us tend to our gardens, and let the flowers of life fill our every vacancy.  Let us not take one moment for granted and live every moment in the present.  I think Baba would want this for all of us, or as she was more apt to say, “This is what you should do, now go and do it.”