By BERNADETTE LAURITZENExecutive Director
LARSO
My husband’s girlfriend passed away just before Christmas. It was a sad day for the whole family, for the whole neighborhood really. I’ll explain that more in just a bit, but my goal here is to demonstrate it is the little things that matter in life. It doesn’t matter if you are 12 or 98.
We’ve lost a lot of people this holiday season. I can’t write about everyone I know, but this time of reflection is impactful. It was magnified in a different way when I viewed it across the generations. I’ll explain two of them, to share the experience.
You see, my husband’s “girlfriend” was 98-year-old Olive “Ollie” Bergauer. She moved on our block years ago with husband Simon. We use to visit from time to time and bring the extra tomatoes from my husband Chad’s garden. We continued to visit after Si passed away, when she became the girlfriend. Her grandson Simon was the first customer of my children’s first lemonade stand.
2019 found Simon and wife Devon, with their first baby girl Cedar. Cedar joined two other Bergauer grandchildren, Benjamin and Olive. They were always fun topics and Ollie reflected over many years about simple life events. They were stories about things that happened in passing, that parents might never think made such an impact.
My husband and Ollie loved talking about many things they had in common. They both loved to fish. They both loved to eat fish. They both loved to garden, although the dirt on our block made that quite a challenge. She even gardened in a bale of hay once, and it worked rather well.
I love to talk, and bake. She loved to talk and liked to eat my baked goods, which could endear anyone to me, truth be told. It was a great relationship. She often told stories about her childhood and that’s one of my purposes for writing this week.
Ollie’s stories were about her mom’s cooking and time with her dad. She recalled he would take her fishing and often tell us about her dad riding her motorcycle. She spoke about the family riding into town from the farm. Simplicity, but joy in regular every day events.
Then there’s Linda and Wayne Hardie, who lost their daughter Krista and the young age of 49. Recently, Krista’s husband Randy and daughter Sierra came to Los Alamos for a memorial. It allowed Krista’s friends to grieve with the family. I didn’t know Krista, but worked for her mom 24 years ago, she threw the baby shower for my first son, small world.
The stellar part was Krista’s daughter Sierra, age 12. She performed during the memorial. A gymnast and cellist and apple of her parent’s eye, she’s taken up the ukulele and composed two songs. The first was called Vertigo, which was the initial symptom, when life began to change for the family.
The second, was about the important thing she learned in her life. Now recall this wisdom comes at the age of 12. “That life is about making memories with the ones you love.” A simple, beautiful, life lesson for us all, seen through the eyes of a child.