to my dear Grandmother

a couple of days ago, my grandmother got really ill and went to the hospital.

To be honest here, I tried to ignore it as far as I could but today it hit me. She might not be with us next year any more. I will have to find out somewhere around this weekend when and how to see her.

She is the kind of person that always goes through life with kind of stoic attitude, at the same time loving and caring. Willpower. Contenance. Discretion and common sense. She is my stepfathers mother and I do remember the moment I saw her for the very first time, where and how she sat, everything around in that room, even a certain smell and sounds in our old appartment in a very distant past, somewhere in the early 80s. She accompanied us for weeks in Spain, cooking, baking, knitting, watching all of us children grow and watching her sons become gentle like her husband who died far too young to see what they had become.

The pastries, she made tons of them for several occasions, my brother and I once ate them at once, which was sort of unbelievable due to the amount and based on a bet (the things you learn from your brother who is a couple of years older and capable of eating anything you are not quick enough to eat yourself). The trips to the german church in Barcelona, where once she got in the middle of a marathon and yet managed to arrive in church without knowing a word of Spanish. The time when she explained the maid in Tarragona how to properly wash a curtain (still with no clue about spanish). Again, the cooking...

I will go up to the North soon to see her once I know how and when.