This is a week of remembering. Yesterday would have been my Dad’s birthday. His birthday came at the same time as the end of the school year. There was always a picnic. Today is the anniversary of my Mom’s passing. My husband’s mother also died this time of year. The picnics those years became “refreshments” in hushed community halls instead. It’s a season of contrasts.
I’ve been thinking about our parents’ lives. I am grateful for them and the generation that rose from the ashes of poverty and famine in the 1930’s and World War in the 1940’s. They knew tough times.
Poverty brought poor nutrition and lack of medical care. Poverty meant that when Dad was five-years old two of his siblings died of illnesses easily treat now. Poverty left him as an only child of grieving parents for several years. Grandma told me that one day she found him playing in the dirt. He was burying matchboxes like the boxes they buried his little brother and baby sister in. He would bury them and dig them up repeatedly telling them to wake up.
My Dad was bullied for being the only boy from an English-speaking family in a school where the other children were refugees from persecution in Russia. The family lost the farm after another crop failed and his father became too ill to carry on. As an 18-year-old my father was preparing to go to war when armistice brought an end to conscription. Lots of young men from the area had already died, so he knew what it meant to be sent overseas.
When Mom was five-years old, her mother died. The family could not afford a doctor. They had already lost several children to diphtheria and other childhood diseases. The crops had failed that year and the money-lender took several sacks of what little wheat they had managed to glean to feed the family over the winter. They were also grieving the news from the Red Cross that no friends or family left behind in The Crimea had survived Stalin’s cruelty. In his grief, her father turned to alcohol. Later, my mother and her younger brothers suffered bullying at school for coming from a German-speaking family in a country that was at war with Germany even though their older brother was fighting for the allies in the Netherlands.
My husband’s parents also grew up in harsh environments. His father lived with immigrant parents in a tar-paper shack on a farm during the dust-bowl famine years. He joined the air force when he was old enough and flew reconnaissance in enemy territory at an age when kids now go to college.
My husband’s mother’s house in Rangoon was bombed by the Japanese and she and her mother and sister barely escaped being sent to a concentration camp by fleeing to India. She spent her teen years inside the walls of a compound there because the people on the outside hated her kind. Since she was a biracial child in the East, she lived in fear as she experienced soul-crushing racism from both sides.
Our parents, and many others of that generation, had amazing perseverance, but they also had deep scars. It’s hard not to dismiss the influence of either the noble or the broken side of the previous generation on our generation (or the trickle down effect on the next). We see the good side or the bad. We tend to idolize or denigrate. I don’t think we can properly honour our parents (or grandparents or great grandparents) without acknowledging how far they came in their lifetimes. That means both the acknowledgement of how devastating the circumstances of the times could be on mental health and the acknowledgement of how hard they worked toward building a better future for their children.
By the time they passed, both my parents and my husband’s parents had faith that God loved them. They were trusting Jesus to finish the healing that began here. It will be wonderful when we are all together and we are all completely well.
I honour them and say thank you for having a vision that extended beyond your lifetime. Thank you for your sacrifice.
Charis: Subject to Change 