grosmama und -papa. [memories]

when my grandparents moved to the retirement home, we had to clean out their entire apartment, go through everything they owned and decide what was going to happen with every single object. what was worth keeping and what was to be thrown away. this process is a very hard one for every family i am sure. my parents were the ones who had to carry most of the weight of it, since they were always very involved in taking care of my grandparents. my mom basically made it possible for them to stay in their home for well into their nineties by looking after them regularly and my father, even though he was their youngest child, ended up managing everything that needed managing.
for me, the entire process was quite different than for the rest of my family because i decided that i wanted to move into their apartment if no one else in the family showed interest in doing so. their apartment is a very special place to me, there are so many memories attached to those rooms and i just couldn't stand the thought of someone else living there. i have carefully reintegrated so many of their things and belongings into the apartment that now seems so different to what it was before. often my sight stumbles over some keepsake and it makes me happy that my grandparents, who sadly both passed a way last year, still inhabit this place by virtue of the things they loved and valued finding a new home here.
my grandparents were extraordinarily awesome. my granddad was the storyteller and the joker, always entertaining everyone, doing crossword puzzles with the clock nearby in order to see how fast he was able to solve it. he was extremely smart, very knowledgable and loved card games more than anything else, much to the chagrin of my dad, who to that day refuses to ever play cards ever again. grandpa was very excited when i had to learn latin, which gave him the chance to boast with everything he still knew, and when i decided to study english, his first reaction was to look for the two english books that he owned and give it to me as a present: pearl s. buck's the good earth (an edition from 1932) and katherine mansfield's the garden party (an edition from 1937). he liked to tell me stories like the one about how he attempted to drive back home with his car with twenty kilometres per hour after getting drunk when he was young. he was an avid photographer and left us boxes full of old slides of my grandma and his travels.
traveling. my grandma loved nothing more than traveling, she was always beaming with joy when i told her that i was going to travel to some part of the world and she looked through photos of my adventures with me for hours and hours... when she was at my age, she was not able to travel because there was the second world war and when that was over she had four little children and that makes it difficult in a whole other way... she traveled much later on but there is another quality to traveling when you are young and have no obligations or commitments at all and that was something she was well aware of. however, it was not something she was bitter about. she was always insanely excited for me and the possibilities i had. 
she was the person that i admired most. she was the best person she could be: kind, generous, content and caring. if i only manage to be half the person she was i will be proud. she loved yellow roses... and here i am crying over these words because i automatically wrote "loves" instead of "loved"... she hated it when people wore black clothes and she never, to my knowledge, put food on the table without explaining exactly what was not okay with it. no, she did not like cooking.
my favourite thing, however, about my grandparents was that they loved me, unconditionally. i always felt inadequate in comparison to my brother and my sister. i was never extremely smart nor was i very pretty and in a way, i always felt like a failure and like i was being judged from everyone else in the family (even though i now know that was never the case) but never from them. they were always so obviously thrilled when i spent time with them, i just knew they did not care in the least about unimportant stuff like that.
although i am at the moment embarking on a minimalist lifestyle, i will never throw anything away that i got from them. there are boundaries. i will, most certainly, not ever let go of their books. 
i will always love them. always.