Grandpa
My grandpa died this weekend.
His passing, coming after nearly a decade of deteriorating physical and mental health in a nursing home, was both expected and merciful. I did most of my grieving in advance, as dementia took away bits and pieces of him and robbed him of most of his words and memories, and the motor control necessary to play his violin and paint with oils. He had several close calls over the years, but he always emerged with his personality intact. His condition even improved when he moved to Providence Mount St. Vincent, a very high-quality facility run by the Catholic church. His gentle chuckle, his irreverent attitude that tested the immovable patience of the nuns who helped care for him, and his good humor and compassion persisted to the end. But last week he had a stroke that started in the brain stem, and he was discovered by staff unresponsive and unbreathing after who knows how many minutes. Fifteen minutes before, he'd been laughing and joking--as much as his advanced dementia allowed--along with one of his friends. Medical technology revived and kept his body going for several more days, but it couldn't bring that back.
We were lucky to have Grandpa around as long as we did. By the early 1980s, his years as a longshoreman were catching up to him and he was drinking a fifth of vodka every day. He was often sullen and withdrawn, though he still loved to tell old stories about the war, the Depression, and what it was like growing up in Aberdeen, Washington. About 25 years ago, he had a stroke that spawned a cycle of seizures that stayed with him until his death. His doctor told him his drinking would kill him if he didn't stop. He stopped, and then this amazing man emerged who was quiet but possessed a sunny disposition, who was proud of his life and his family and funny as hell, who really gave a shit about the world, who began painting again and was cool enough to have his art on display at hip cafes in Seattle. This was, after all, a man who went to musical school at Cornish when John Cage was an instructor and came of age in a time when creative ferment spawned the styles that would characterize the century.
I admired him. Much of my political point of view came from reading old stacks of The Nation, piled precipitously in the bathroom at my grandparents' house. They must have gone back 30 years or more, to at least the 1950s when the magazine's staff was in the middle of the battle over McCarthyism. The one thing Grandpa was more than a lifetime union man was a Finn. He was proud of his heritage and let everyone know. He wore t-shirts with the Finnish flag and talked of "sisu," the Finnish word roughly meaning guts, in the broader metaphorical sense of fortitude and perseverance. He was "suomalainen." People often ask about the origin of my last name, and after years of explaining the Finnish language and culture I've sometimes adopted a version of his attitude of friendly Finnish pride that he came by honestly. The tagline for my livejournal is an example of that.
I don't remember the details of most of his stories. When I was a kid, I didn't appreciate their importance. By the time I did appreciate them a bit, I didn't remember to write them down. By the time I realized I should record them, his memories were fading. But I do know the basic story of his life, and in memory I'm going to include it here.
Grandpa was born in 1917 in Butte, Montana as the son of Finnish immigrants. They had arrived in the country in the previous decade as part of a wave of Finns who were escaping the reach of the Russian Czar, who ruled over a Finland that in previous eras has been occupied by Swedes and Norwegians when it was not a province under Russian control. It is likely that my great-grandfather was avoiding conscription. In any case, Butte in 1917 was a wild place, a frontier town divided between the Anaconada Mining Company and the mostly-immigrant miners who toiled in its employ extracting copper in vast mines under the hills and mountains across western Montana. The immigrants, in turn, were grouped according to their ethnicity. Finns lived with Finns, Swedes with Swedes but closer to the Finns than either to the Russians, and Russians with Russians, each primarily speaking their ancestral language at home and English in town or at work. They brought over a microcosm of the ethnic and political turmoil in the old country. They all pretty much despised the czar, and imperialism, and the kind of capitalism that made their predicament the best of several tough choices. They joined unions to protect their interests. The most significant union in Butte was probably the IWW.
My grandpa was a Finn, so he grew up speaking Finnish. The Finns were mostly Wobblies, and their life revolved around the union, the Finnish halls, and the local saunas. Around 1920 strike-breakers and the government cracked down on radical unions, a prominent Wobbly was lynched and hung from the railroad in downtown, and many of the miners picked up and left town. It was around this time that my grandpa's family left, relocating to the Pacific coast in the lumber town of Aberdeen, Washington. My great-grandfather's health had been devastated by his work in the mines--he would eventually die of black lung years later--and so he set himself up as a barber. As in Butte, the Finnish community in Aberdeen was closely-knit, Finns spoke Finnish at home, and the community centered on the local Finn Hall. My grandpa spent much of his childhood in that hall, when he wasn't running with a group of kids who got into mostly friendly territorial squabbles with the Swedish kids across the river, each side throwing rocks at the other.
There's really nothing like the Finn Hall in contemporary society. It wasn't a fraternal society for old men, or a labor hall--though those functions were included. It was an intellectual salon, a public square, a day care, an informal school for children, an auditorium, a dance hall, a place for feasting on holidays. It was a church without the religion, and most immigrant Finns at the time were not particularly religious in practice. My grandfather learned how to play the fiddle in the Finn Hall, and quickly demonstrated a prodigious talent.
My grandfather's adolescence coincided with the Great Depression. He was 12 in 1929 and 24 in 1941. He had stories of vast numbers of people on the move, looking for work, when he was a teenager. He took odd jobs himself to help the family when he could. But his musical talent was the motivational center of his life. In the late 30s, his buddies in the Finn Hall helped raise the money to send him to Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, so he could pursue his musical studies. The school was a center of creative influence and he relished the opportunity. Around this same time, many of his friends were volunteering for service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascists in Spain, a cause that he supported strongly.
With the outbreak of the world war, he entered the Army Air Force and was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio as an airplane mechanic. He never went overseas and wasn't much of a soldier. He was a member of the band and that was so much more important to him than the war that I honestly grew up thinking that being in the band was the whole point of his service. He met my grandmother there, and later told stories about reusing a day pass by hiding the date so that he could visit her as frequently as he could. He wasn't just irreverent, he was constitutionally anti-authoritarian.
My dad was born in 1944, the only child my grandfather ever had. In the late 40s (I think 1949), the family relocated from San Antonio to Seattle. By then his father had died, and his mother was remarried to an influential member of the ILWU, the powerful West Coast union of longshoremen that absorbed a lot of the radicals who were once in the IWW. His step-father helped him get a job as a longshoreman to pay the bills, while he also played violin for the Seattle Symphony.
Grandpa had four good decades in the heart of his life working hard at the docks, playing music, hiking in the Cascades and fishing local lakes and rivers with my dad, and filling in the rest of his time drinking with his fellow longshoremen and musicians. He used the inheritance from his step-father and my grandmother's family to buy property around the Seattle area, so that they were able to live quite comfortably. They lived first in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, moving just before the Central Freeway (I-5) ripped apart their neighborhood and ran through a block away. I think they lived for some time in the house in the Leschi neighborhood where my dad lives now, before buying a house in West Seattle to be closer to the waterfront. He and my grandma collected cats, usually having about four of them but having as many as six at one time. For the last decade of my grandma's life, they moved to a smaller house without stairs along Alki Beach. My grandpa retired from his longshoreman gig around 1980, and from the symphony a few years later. He confronted his alcoholism and was able to enjoy his retirement sober, though afflicted by frequent seizures. He spent his time playing music, painting, enjoying the sunny Seattle summers and cursing our winters, playing with cats and crooning to them in Finnish, and in the last few years before he moved into assisted living, stopped driving and got around by riding a souped-up three-wheeled cycle along the waterfront and up and down the hills to the shopping districts of West Seattle.
My grandpa appreciated his good fortune. Though raised as a union radicalist, he was in practice an FDR Democrat. He did retain both his Finnish pride and a streak of radicalism. He voted several times for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, solely because Hall was a Finn. I remember my dad having more than one exasperated conversation with grandpa about how he could possibly support a Stalinist who was an apologist for the worst abuses of the Soviet Union, incidentally including some pretty bad treatment of Finland. But grandpa stuck with it. Grandpa was probably the only person in America--excepting other Finns--who was rooting against the US team in the 1980 Olympics. Everyone remembers the miracle victory that year but forgets that the US and USSR faced off in the semifinal. The final pitted the US against Finland, and of course grandpa was on the side of the Finns.
He lived a good life.
I miss him. I haven't been able to have a real conversation with him for years, and so I've been missing him for a long time. I'm glad that the proud man I admire so much was able to go quickly and gently at the end of his life. I'm even more glad that he was able to meet my daughter on more than one occasion, and look into her eyes, and laugh.
...and now I'm tearing up, just a bit. There's still a little grief for me to bear, though nothing like what my dad is going through. I feel like I should sum up somehow, but I don't quite know how. Maybe I should just say this, as a reminder to myself and to anyone reading: appreciate the people you love, listen to what they have to say about life, and do everything you can to remember what they say so that you can bring a little bit of them forward with you, when they're gone. And don't forget to laugh.
His passing, coming after nearly a decade of deteriorating physical and mental health in a nursing home, was both expected and merciful. I did most of my grieving in advance, as dementia took away bits and pieces of him and robbed him of most of his words and memories, and the motor control necessary to play his violin and paint with oils. He had several close calls over the years, but he always emerged with his personality intact. His condition even improved when he moved to Providence Mount St. Vincent, a very high-quality facility run by the Catholic church. His gentle chuckle, his irreverent attitude that tested the immovable patience of the nuns who helped care for him, and his good humor and compassion persisted to the end. But last week he had a stroke that started in the brain stem, and he was discovered by staff unresponsive and unbreathing after who knows how many minutes. Fifteen minutes before, he'd been laughing and joking--as much as his advanced dementia allowed--along with one of his friends. Medical technology revived and kept his body going for several more days, but it couldn't bring that back.
We were lucky to have Grandpa around as long as we did. By the early 1980s, his years as a longshoreman were catching up to him and he was drinking a fifth of vodka every day. He was often sullen and withdrawn, though he still loved to tell old stories about the war, the Depression, and what it was like growing up in Aberdeen, Washington. About 25 years ago, he had a stroke that spawned a cycle of seizures that stayed with him until his death. His doctor told him his drinking would kill him if he didn't stop. He stopped, and then this amazing man emerged who was quiet but possessed a sunny disposition, who was proud of his life and his family and funny as hell, who really gave a shit about the world, who began painting again and was cool enough to have his art on display at hip cafes in Seattle. This was, after all, a man who went to musical school at Cornish when John Cage was an instructor and came of age in a time when creative ferment spawned the styles that would characterize the century.
I admired him. Much of my political point of view came from reading old stacks of The Nation, piled precipitously in the bathroom at my grandparents' house. They must have gone back 30 years or more, to at least the 1950s when the magazine's staff was in the middle of the battle over McCarthyism. The one thing Grandpa was more than a lifetime union man was a Finn. He was proud of his heritage and let everyone know. He wore t-shirts with the Finnish flag and talked of "sisu," the Finnish word roughly meaning guts, in the broader metaphorical sense of fortitude and perseverance. He was "suomalainen." People often ask about the origin of my last name, and after years of explaining the Finnish language and culture I've sometimes adopted a version of his attitude of friendly Finnish pride that he came by honestly. The tagline for my livejournal is an example of that.
I don't remember the details of most of his stories. When I was a kid, I didn't appreciate their importance. By the time I did appreciate them a bit, I didn't remember to write them down. By the time I realized I should record them, his memories were fading. But I do know the basic story of his life, and in memory I'm going to include it here.
Grandpa was born in 1917 in Butte, Montana as the son of Finnish immigrants. They had arrived in the country in the previous decade as part of a wave of Finns who were escaping the reach of the Russian Czar, who ruled over a Finland that in previous eras has been occupied by Swedes and Norwegians when it was not a province under Russian control. It is likely that my great-grandfather was avoiding conscription. In any case, Butte in 1917 was a wild place, a frontier town divided between the Anaconada Mining Company and the mostly-immigrant miners who toiled in its employ extracting copper in vast mines under the hills and mountains across western Montana. The immigrants, in turn, were grouped according to their ethnicity. Finns lived with Finns, Swedes with Swedes but closer to the Finns than either to the Russians, and Russians with Russians, each primarily speaking their ancestral language at home and English in town or at work. They brought over a microcosm of the ethnic and political turmoil in the old country. They all pretty much despised the czar, and imperialism, and the kind of capitalism that made their predicament the best of several tough choices. They joined unions to protect their interests. The most significant union in Butte was probably the IWW.
My grandpa was a Finn, so he grew up speaking Finnish. The Finns were mostly Wobblies, and their life revolved around the union, the Finnish halls, and the local saunas. Around 1920 strike-breakers and the government cracked down on radical unions, a prominent Wobbly was lynched and hung from the railroad in downtown, and many of the miners picked up and left town. It was around this time that my grandpa's family left, relocating to the Pacific coast in the lumber town of Aberdeen, Washington. My great-grandfather's health had been devastated by his work in the mines--he would eventually die of black lung years later--and so he set himself up as a barber. As in Butte, the Finnish community in Aberdeen was closely-knit, Finns spoke Finnish at home, and the community centered on the local Finn Hall. My grandpa spent much of his childhood in that hall, when he wasn't running with a group of kids who got into mostly friendly territorial squabbles with the Swedish kids across the river, each side throwing rocks at the other.
There's really nothing like the Finn Hall in contemporary society. It wasn't a fraternal society for old men, or a labor hall--though those functions were included. It was an intellectual salon, a public square, a day care, an informal school for children, an auditorium, a dance hall, a place for feasting on holidays. It was a church without the religion, and most immigrant Finns at the time were not particularly religious in practice. My grandfather learned how to play the fiddle in the Finn Hall, and quickly demonstrated a prodigious talent.
My grandfather's adolescence coincided with the Great Depression. He was 12 in 1929 and 24 in 1941. He had stories of vast numbers of people on the move, looking for work, when he was a teenager. He took odd jobs himself to help the family when he could. But his musical talent was the motivational center of his life. In the late 30s, his buddies in the Finn Hall helped raise the money to send him to Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, so he could pursue his musical studies. The school was a center of creative influence and he relished the opportunity. Around this same time, many of his friends were volunteering for service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascists in Spain, a cause that he supported strongly.
With the outbreak of the world war, he entered the Army Air Force and was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio as an airplane mechanic. He never went overseas and wasn't much of a soldier. He was a member of the band and that was so much more important to him than the war that I honestly grew up thinking that being in the band was the whole point of his service. He met my grandmother there, and later told stories about reusing a day pass by hiding the date so that he could visit her as frequently as he could. He wasn't just irreverent, he was constitutionally anti-authoritarian.
My dad was born in 1944, the only child my grandfather ever had. In the late 40s (I think 1949), the family relocated from San Antonio to Seattle. By then his father had died, and his mother was remarried to an influential member of the ILWU, the powerful West Coast union of longshoremen that absorbed a lot of the radicals who were once in the IWW. His step-father helped him get a job as a longshoreman to pay the bills, while he also played violin for the Seattle Symphony.
Grandpa had four good decades in the heart of his life working hard at the docks, playing music, hiking in the Cascades and fishing local lakes and rivers with my dad, and filling in the rest of his time drinking with his fellow longshoremen and musicians. He used the inheritance from his step-father and my grandmother's family to buy property around the Seattle area, so that they were able to live quite comfortably. They lived first in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, moving just before the Central Freeway (I-5) ripped apart their neighborhood and ran through a block away. I think they lived for some time in the house in the Leschi neighborhood where my dad lives now, before buying a house in West Seattle to be closer to the waterfront. He and my grandma collected cats, usually having about four of them but having as many as six at one time. For the last decade of my grandma's life, they moved to a smaller house without stairs along Alki Beach. My grandpa retired from his longshoreman gig around 1980, and from the symphony a few years later. He confronted his alcoholism and was able to enjoy his retirement sober, though afflicted by frequent seizures. He spent his time playing music, painting, enjoying the sunny Seattle summers and cursing our winters, playing with cats and crooning to them in Finnish, and in the last few years before he moved into assisted living, stopped driving and got around by riding a souped-up three-wheeled cycle along the waterfront and up and down the hills to the shopping districts of West Seattle.
My grandpa appreciated his good fortune. Though raised as a union radicalist, he was in practice an FDR Democrat. He did retain both his Finnish pride and a streak of radicalism. He voted several times for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, solely because Hall was a Finn. I remember my dad having more than one exasperated conversation with grandpa about how he could possibly support a Stalinist who was an apologist for the worst abuses of the Soviet Union, incidentally including some pretty bad treatment of Finland. But grandpa stuck with it. Grandpa was probably the only person in America--excepting other Finns--who was rooting against the US team in the 1980 Olympics. Everyone remembers the miracle victory that year but forgets that the US and USSR faced off in the semifinal. The final pitted the US against Finland, and of course grandpa was on the side of the Finns.
He lived a good life.
I miss him. I haven't been able to have a real conversation with him for years, and so I've been missing him for a long time. I'm glad that the proud man I admire so much was able to go quickly and gently at the end of his life. I'm even more glad that he was able to meet my daughter on more than one occasion, and look into her eyes, and laugh.
...and now I'm tearing up, just a bit. There's still a little grief for me to bear, though nothing like what my dad is going through. I feel like I should sum up somehow, but I don't quite know how. Maybe I should just say this, as a reminder to myself and to anyone reading: appreciate the people you love, listen to what they have to say about life, and do everything you can to remember what they say so that you can bring a little bit of them forward with you, when they're gone. And don't forget to laugh.