home again

dispatch 71

Jun 11, 2025

hello all, writing from Finland on my very first solo trip here to attend my grandmother’s funeral. It feels like a huge loss yet again, so much I never got to ask her, all of the final visits I didn’t take because of work and money and inconvenience. Stupid reasons in the face of everything. But I’m here now.

home again

My grandmother’s was the last funeral to be held in the original church. At 399 years old, it closed two days later for a year and a half long renovation. In part to add modern conveniences like heating and bathrooms, and in part to remove ancient remains that have long been hidden under the floorboards, we made it just in time. I think she would have liked being last, holding a line in the history of this old place. When we gather to place bouquets of flowers on her grave, everyone is older than I remember from just 2 years ago. The tears come when I think too hard about time passing. My six-year-old niece slips up and quietly takes my hand.

In the kitchen later, my uncle and I talk about loss and grief. About the body shutting down and the eerie similarities in how my mother and grandmother died, just one year and one month apart. My grandmother was 92, my mother 68. We talk about the good memories, laugh about the time my dad stepped out of his boot and up to his knee in cow manure but my grandmother wouldn’t let him throw away his sock and insisted on hand washing it clean. And the time my mom cleaned the coffee machine with undiluted pickling vinegar until all of our eyes were streaming and she still refused to admit it may have been a mistake. I learn that he used to call his sister Gundi. The thought of my serious mother with a nickname feel absurd in the best way, like I have just uncovered some hidden jewel from a past where she was able to take herself less seriously.

People I pass on my daily walks through the woods or in the town’s only cafe stop me to ask if I am Gun-Britt’s daughter. I know I look American, I can’t stop smiling at people I pass, a decidedly un-Finnish thing to do. But I am welcome here. I meet a man who knew my mother at the town cafe and he walks me outside to point out the different rooms of her tiny high school just in time. A half hour later, a large yellow machine demolishes the building. He points out the old movie theater, her apartment window, the ice cream kiosk where she worked during the summer. I already know some of this but it’s still nice to hear. Before we leave, he tells me to come back, that part of me is here and that part must be watered like a seed.

He’s right.

At the funeral, the priest breaks into English to talk about my grandmother’s trip to America in 1995, and how happy she had been to visit her daughter and her granddaughter. There are pictures of that trip tucked into an album in her room when I help to clean it out. The pages crackle as I turn them. I see her standing with my mother and my father’s mother in the sun of my childhood backyard. In front of them, I am small and dark, wrapped in their arms, happy to be with them. I find other albums too, photos of her wedding day to her second husband where she looks like Audrey Hepburn in her 50s, both her and Gerald smiling so happily, finally home. My grandmother didn’t live an easy life, but she got her love story.

I don’t have anything profound to say about being here, just that like all things worth doing it is hard and terrible and beautiful and profound and I am grateful. In this continued cycle of loss, I am now the matriarch and last remaining woman of my direct line. I did not expect that at 36, but here we are facing things we didn’t expect everyday.

Every chance I get I take to the woods, Snufkin-green rain jacket zipped up, I climb rocks and sit on soft moss, dip my hands into still-cold ponds. There is a part of me that belongs here. A part of me that cannot die, just as there is a part of my mother and my grandmother who are right here in the lingonberry patches and lichen-covered boulders, some pulse of us that still beats. I chase the parts of them that are still here through the trees, but the Peter Pan shadow of them always just slips through my fingers in the way that shadows should. Nothing ends and everything ends, and all we get is the in between.

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