My grandmother passed on April 29:th. She got 92 years old.
Two weeks after burying her daughter, my aunt, my Grandmother started feeling worse. Her problems with breathing and coughing had escalated. She had been suffering from Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is a lung and airway disease, for almost her whole life. The disease itself is usually caused by smoking, but she got it from working. This caused her to have trouble breathing and breathing heavily as she got older. She had this machine at home that helped her breathing when she needed it, which I will remember the sound of for the rest of my life. My, now last, aunt took her to the hospital to get her examined and she seemed to be getting a bit better.
The hospital itself got very full the coming days, maybe because there were a lot of elders living nearby or something else, but it got filled. Since my Grandmother only had been staying there for a couple of days and her situation wasn’t very critical at the moment, she got moved to another hospital where they also would be able to give her more help with her lungs. Though there was a downside with that hospital. Most of the doctors only spoke Finnish, which she doesn’t speak or understand. Everyone in Finland doesn’t speak Finnish, there is a quite big part of the population that doesn’t since Finland is an old colony of Sweden. My Grandma only spoke Swedish. She coped with the situation very well though and she tried to see the bright side of it. The staff of the hospital also handled very well with the situation and they did their best to talk Swedish with her.
My family went there a few days later to be there with her and my aunt, to the new hospital. I couldn’t go with them since I had a lot of school work I had to take care of. Not that I could concentrate at all on getting my work done after losing my aunt just a few weeks earlier and now having a very sick grandma, but I had to. My absolutely best friends Erik, Fredrik, Anton and Jessie got me through those hard days, even though they might not know they did. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Looking back, I don’t regret that I didn’t go there with them to Finland after hearing how it was. I’m glad that my last memory of her is a happy one, I wouldn’t want to see her in pain. I spoke with my mother every day when they were there and she told me she had never seen my grandma like that. She was different and you could see she were in pain. She had not been sleeping for 24 hours, she was afraid to lay down since it would get harder to breathe then. Obviously it’s not good at all to not rest when you’re that old.
The day after my family got there she started having pains in her stomach. They examined her again and they figured she was constipated. This caused her to sometimes shout in pain which my mom decribed to me. Horrifying. They couldn’t help her the way they usually treat patients with constipation or give her the “best” medicine against it due to her lung disease and her high blood pressure. She got some other medicine. It got a bit less painful for her, but she was still in pain and kept shouting. She eventually got some sleep while they were there and they had to tell her to rest and sleep when she seemed tired. They also had to tell her to cough sometimes but she didn’t really have energy to always do so.
The day my family went back home to Sweden she got an X-ray of her stomach. She seemed to feel a bit better when they left the hospital but the x-ray showed that it was still quite critical, the medicine didn’t help that much. My aunt and my counsins were there with her.
Five days after my family got home my Dad went there again. I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to go there again. He had been to Finland four or five times in just 4 months or so, every trip must have been just as hard. First he lost his sister and now he was might going to lose his mother. Everything was okay when he arrived. He and my aunt spent almost all time they were awake at the hospital, they only went home to sleep basically. The visiting hours at hospitals are quite strict in Finland, but they could stay there as much as they liked.
A day or two went by and my grandma had started to eat quite well again. Everything was “normal”. My dad and my aunt went to my counsins get another car to the hospital in case one of them had to go somewhere.
When they got back they could see through the little window in the door that she had stopped breathing. She had died while they were away, while she was asleep.
My dad called us later that evening and told us that she had passed. It came a bit as a shock for me. I had lost two of my closest family members in less than two months. My mother, my brother and I just sat there in the kitchen all quiet. I think I was first to break out in tears, I can’t really remember. I can’t remember the following days either, I was in a state of grief. It felt so unreal.
The funeral took place on the 19:th of May. It was a sunny and warm Saturday morning. Some from my mother’s side and everyone from my father’s side came to the funeral. I carried the coffin into the church with my dad and four of my cousin’s husbands with the closest family members following us. Unfortunately we couldn’t bring the coffin down in the grave because it had been raining a lot the day before, so they had to pump up water before, so we had to take the memorial ceremony first.
It’s so sad and emotional to sit and listen to others talking about their memories of someone who has passed, but at the same time it makes it easier somehow. The point of the ceremony I will remember most was when one of my dad’s cousins came to us to thank us for the funeral. He took my hand, placed his other hand over it, looked me in the eyes with tears rolling down his cheek and said; “There has been a lot of sadness in your lives lately”. I just couldn’t hold the tears back and I had to go away and be for myself for a couple of minutes. All memories of my grandma and my aunt just came flowing and I cried and cried. It’s not easy, not at all. To lose two family members in about a month is not something that should happen. That man is a great man, he has made a big imprint on my life.
It was the toughest 100 meters I’ve ever walked when I carried the coffin to the side of the grave. They managed to get the water out of it during the ceremony, so we could bring it down. The hardest part of the whole funeral was when my mother gave me a red rose to throw into the grave. It was just heartbreaking to stand there so close but at the same time so far away from her, and throw a rose on her white coffin.
They say you get perspective on your life when thing like this happen, and I really have. I know what is worth living for and what is not, I know what makes me happy and what doesn’t. I’m not afraid to say that I still grieve the deaths of my grandmother and aunt, because I do, it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. But I also live a better life than before, because I’ve learned so much about life itself. My dad’s cousin taughth me a lot with the simple words he said. I appreciate life much more than I’ve fone before. Both my grandma and my aunt appreciated life a lot, and that is something I’ve learnt to do more and more.
The last memory I got from my grandmother is from my aunt’s funeral. I helped her to walk that Saturday, when she had buried her daugther. She didn’t say very much that day, but there are a few words that she said to my father’s cousin that I will remember;
“Vi måste sluta ses så här”.
Which in English means “We have to stop see each other like this”. My family is quite big, so it’s hard to gather everyone at the same time otherwise. She meant that it’s a shame that we have only meet everyone in our family at funerals.
The last memory I think my Grandma got from me is the day before we went home after my aunt’s funeral. She sat in the window when I was shoveling snow with our tractor on her yard. Yes, I do know how to drive a tractor. I come from a family of farmers. My grandma and my grandfather were both farmers, even my dad was a farmer when he was young. I’m not that city-boy everyone thinks I am. I mean, not a lot of people grow up with throwing wood onto the back of a tractor or know what harrowing is. I’m proud of where I come from, and I like to believe that my Grandma was proud of me when she saw that my dad has taught me everything I need to know about farming.
My grandmother was an excellent student and she loved to work at the farm and with animals. 25 years ago she still took care of calves. When she got too old to work she still loved being with animals, which is why she had a cat even until she passed.
I will always remember when I was younger. I always wanted it to be summer or winter so that I could go to Finland and see both my mother’s parents and my grandmother. I still liked to go there as I grew older, even though I sometimes told my friends I didn’t. There is some form of peace you find there that you can’t find here at home. It’s quiet and it’s just, great really. I will always remember the early mornings when I was about 6-11 years old. I went up early to sit in the kitchen by the table and play Pokemon until my grandma woke up. She made me breakfast and we sat there and talked until the others woke up. She didn’t talk a lot otherwise, but she always meant every word she said. I will always remember the tiny pancakes she made and her home-made strawberry jam. I will always remember her socks, she loved knitting. She always made me and my brother a pair of socks for every Christmas. I’m 17, soon 18 and I still wear them at home when it’s cold outside, they are the most comfortable socks you can find. She was one of my heroes.
There are so many memories that will live on, even though she’s gone. My Grandmother was buried on a sunny Saturday morning and she will always be remembered.
Rest in peace Ann-Lis Hansell
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1920-01-30 - 2012-04-29
