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Death of a Pensioner
Estonia's fatalistic elder generation is vanishing. Will anyone remember?
My wife's grandfather Karl was born in the Republic of Estonia and he died in the Republic of Estonia, except that it was never that simple.
When Karl was born, the colors of the flag were blue, black, and white. When he was 12, a red flag with a golden hammer and sickle replaced it. When he was 13, a different red flag arrived, this one with a black and white swastika. When he was 16, the first red flag returned to stay for very a long time. It wasn't until Karl was 61 that the blue, black, and white reappeared. He was 63 when the red flag came down forever.
The parade of colors did not stop there. When Karl was 76, the blue, black, and white flag was paired with two more: the blue and gold of the European Union and the blue and white of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The country's leaders told Karl that he was now a citizen of an ultramodern e-state and that he could vote online, which sounded great, except that he didn't own a computer. The authorities also informed him that he could travel to such exotic destinations as the Canary Islands or the Azores without getting his passport stamped, but Karl was too weak for such adventures. Besides, he didn't have the money.
In recent weeks, news stories abounded about a currency switch. When Karl was born in 1928, Estonia had moved from the mark to the kroon. In his lifetime, he had known rubles and reichsmarks, too. Now Estonia would have new money, coins and bills that were good in Madrid and Paris and Berlin. But Karl never got to use the euro because he died on December 10, a month shy of his 83rd birthday, quite a wizened age for a country where the average life expectancy for males at birth is still just 68 years.
Not that it would have troubled him. Karl had learned at an early age to live his life away from the comings and goings of governments and currencies. The retired veterinarian spent his last days as a pensioner in a three-room apartment in south Estonia, watching TV and reading newspapers, living together with his painfully blunt wife of more than fifty years, and his chronically unemployed, middle-aged alcoholic son. He had lived in the small space since the 1950s, and it hadn't changed much since then. The wallpaper was the same, as was the furniture. The furnaces were still heated by wood, and the building had two shared "dry" toilets in the front hallway. A second family lived above with a pair of teenage sons who liked to blast rap music at inappropriate hours, but Karl never complained about it.
Actually, he never complained about anything. He didn't gripe about how the Soviets had arrested his father, a former White Russian soldier, and sent him to Siberia for ten years at the end of the Second World War. He didn't whine about how the Stalinist authorities had prohibited him from studying geography and pushed him into veterinary medicine instead. For Estonia's current crop of leaders, the Soviet years were the dark ages, but for Karl they were the time when he was a young father with a secure job and a happy family. Over the years, I had tried to engage Karl about Estonian politics — I once caught him with a People's Union flier in his hands — but Karl just shrugged, as if to say, "What should I know about any of this stuff?" Karl wasn't an ideologue. He just rolled with the punches.
And resilient he was. This was a man who had survived cancer, a one-kidneyed diabetic who somehow always manage to step a little bit faster than death. He had gone into local hospitals for years, yet he had always managed to come out. He outlived his younger brother Leo by a year, his sister-in-law Salme by two, but even Karl couldn't shrug and smile his way out of an end. He died late at night, a few hours after my wife went to visit him at the Viljandi hospital.
A few days later, a notice appeared in the back of a regional newspaper announcing his death. A small party of relatives attended the funeral in a frosty chapel and then bore his coffin through thigh-high snow to its final resting place beneath towering pines in an ancient cemetery overlooking a frozen lake. Half a dozen shovels were handed out, and the relatives made quick work of filling in the grave. The work was therapeutic. Afterwards, there was a reception at a restaurant. A modest meal was consumed. A cup of hot broth, a meat- and cabbage-filled pastry, pork, potatoes, and a kringel, a dessert laden with chocolate and raisins.
Vodka was poured and Karl was toasted once, but nobody said a word to each other until the alcohol took effect, and it would take several more sips of the hard stuff for conversation to reach even a quiet murmur. It is custom at Estonian funerals to say some good things about the deceased and my wife's eulogy lasted a good 10 minutes. She told of how she used to accompany him to the countryside to put down sick animals and how the good-natured veterinarian had explained that all living creatures eventually had to die.
Then I got up and talked about the man I knew, the positive man who took it all in stride, even when he was clinging to life in a stinky hospice with paint chipping off the walls, packed into a room with three other geriatrics who also had never managed to pay their taxes online or take off for a visa-free trip to Tenerife. I actually didn't mention the hospice or the online tax paying. But Karl wouldn't have appreciated it anyway. He was never one for complaining.
When I sat down, Karl's blunt widow, now struggling with her own disease that required she be hospitalized at the same time that he was dying, said frankly that she was disappointed he hadn't waited longer for her to return from the hospital, and that he wasn't positive at all, he was actually quite negative in the end. After the meal, his alcoholic son tucked a leftover bottle of vodka beneath his coat and scraped the leftover food into a styrofoam container. Karl’s other middle-aged son, miraculously sober and employed, the one who had arranged the modest funeral for the modest man, helped his frail mother and his sick brother to his car and the trio returned to the three-room apartment, living quarters that aren't much when compared to some others, but at least are warm, and at least are home.
In Estonia, on Christmas day, it is custom to visit the resting places of lost relatives, to light a candle in their memory. We couldn't make it to Karl's grave on that day though. It had snowed the night before, and our car was buried in a deep snowdrift. But I thought of Karl that day and I think of him today, a day that would have been his 83rd birthday. I must think of him so that he will not be forgotten.