The week started badly. On the day we were leaving for Poland, my sister found out that her husband's (Peebo's) uncle had just passed away from a heart attack. He was a humble, nice man, who was close to and very supportive of his sister (Peebo's mom) and her family. He
was also far too young to be taken away from them. We got on the plane disheartened, knowing that now our family was going to be experiencing two funerals in one week.
In Poland, it was Winter, and an unusually cold one at that. After nearly 24 hours of travel, we found ourselves at my mother's cousin's house near Gdynia, watching the outside temperature drop to -15C. Their hospitality was wonderful and we had a great evening catching up and playing with my mother's two young grand-nieces, Roksana and Sandra:
I let Roksana play with my camera for a while and she took some great photos from a 5 year old's perspective:
The next day we met with my "cousin" Alek, who's family we've been close to all our lives. He took the day off from preparing for his Architecture exams (I felt his pain) to see us, and even cooked us dinner before taking us on to the train station.
Our next destination was my grandmother and aunt's house in Chojnice. My father and his sister Alina grew up in this house, and I spent many summers there. Hauntingly and comfortingly, nothing in it has ever changed. The plants have grown larger, but the same furniture stands in each spot, the plates and utensils are in the same places I used to put them away in the kitchen, and even the dried flowers are still in their vaces:
Unfortunately, the house is huge and too expensive to heat very well. As the temperatures dropped to -25C outside, we spent the next few days trying to keep warm inside, where it was 5C (41F). The hot water was only in the kitchen, where it dripped out of a small faucet over the sink. My sister and I slept in layers of thermal underwear and our warmest ski caps, and we spent the days huddled in blankets or doing jumping jacks. Needless to say, I didn't study much.
My grandmother's funeral, though in cold wind and blowing snow, was nice. Many people who have know our family for more than 50 years stopped by and told us their memories of her. My grandmother had been a champion bridge player and the director of the bridge club in the city (I had grown up building card houses out of discarded packs of cards) and people reminisced about their bridge days with her.
After the funeral, my sister and I left my parents in Chojnice to deal with the hard and overwhelming responsibilities that come when a family member dies. Though it was hard to leave the house in Chojnice, not knowing if we would ever see it again, we were both so cold, we were ready to be anywhere but there. In Warsaw, we saw the parents of my godson, played billiards in their beautiful (and warm) new house, and -finally- had the opportunity to take a hot shower. The trip was promising to end well, until I realized that I had left my non-refundable plane ticket back in Chojnice, without any chance of going back in time to get it.
Nonetheless, it was a trip worth taking, though I am now frightened by the prospect of catching up for next week's finals. I'm jetlagged, sick and overwhelmed, but I am at ready to start studying again. I even feel lucky to be without a real sleep schedule at this point, because tomorrow, I will be getting up at 4:30 am to shadow a third year student during a surgical oncology rotation. I have been told to wear running shoes, and I take that advice to heart.
This will definitely be the last post for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment