Memories Soon to Be Forgotten

On the 21st of December, as I rushed out the front doors of my now deserted dormitory, army duffle of laundry slung over my shoulders, the cold Milwaukee slush sloshing beneath my boots, into my family's old Saturn Vue to catch a ride home for Christmas Break, the last thing on my mind was the possibility that I might lose a loved one. Less than 24 hours later, Ernie Varga went into cardiac arrest for the final time as I drove that same car at unsafe speeds towards Rockford in an attempt to see him before his passing. I didn't make it. The next few days register in my memory like some kind of stereo cassette tape where periodically the right or left channel simply cuts out. I can remember bursts of memory in fine clear detail, the tick of the clock on Ehorn-Adams funeral home wall, the way the mortician's hands moved over the paperwork, the colors of every casket along that wall and their prices. There are other moments in which I hardly remember any sensory input, just emotion, a sort of unstable feeling, as though I'd been standing on a floor which simply ceased to exist, only to reveal another floor an inch or so below it.

Ernie Varga was, through and through, a technical man. For over half his life he had pursued engineering as a profession. His retirement consisted of two days in the hospital. To that point, he vended his services out of an office near the Wisconsin border — Varga and Associates. My cousin Hans and I grew up in that building. As young children, we often would rummage through Papa's desk drawers, looking at old pennies and typewriter ribbons and reading glasses, our grandmother, Eleonore Varga, shouting that he ought to make sure there were no pills inside. Now, Hans and I rummaged again. Ostensibly this was to help locate his D-212 Army Discharge Papers in order to secure for him a state funeral, but really Hans and I seemed to be frantically grasping, trying to feel his hand in ours on every stamp handle and pencap, to reconstruct a man out of the remnants of his life's work. I clung to dictation tapes and old notebooks, trying to find something, some shred of his voice untouched by age and ill health. In the end I found some, but only mere mutterings about "burgundy colored discolorations on the outside of the crack in the masonry" and a half hour recording of a documentary about some camels.

We dug deeper, Windows XP CAD software discs gave way to music cassettes gave way to rolodexes, as we uncovered years and years of artifacts. Soon we had gone farther back than all our play as children had ever led us, into the bin drawers near the legs of the desk where we'd once sat as children and heard stories of mid-century rural Austria, and the war, and his army buddies, and the Varga tavern out in Cissero. Memories to him, but merely legends to us, who had never seen a locomotive strafed, never been to central Europe, never met our great grandmother or seen her tavern, who barely remember Marshall Field's and who had never known a young Papa, except sometimes in the glint in his eyes as he sang old Austrian songs. Inside the drawers lay the evidence. A green license plate reading "U.S. FORCES IN GERMANY - 1953," A pinup calendar from the tavern, a few photographs of young Eleonore, a placard reading "Deputy Post Engineer - E. Varga." Concrete proofs of stories, which would, over the next few days, be recounted again and again, almost as a way to grip onto those last wisps of his spirit that clung around us.

By the day of the visitation, I thought I'd done all my crying and that I could be strong, moving forward with only a dull sense of loss, but as Oma approached the casket, tears that had been in her eyes now spilling over her face and onto the shoulder of his cold suit coat, I too began to cry. For 62 years she had stood by his side. Halfway around the globe, she'd followed him. They'd immigrated to the U.S. together, raised a family, watched as their children raised children of their own, run a business and now, for the first time since she was scarcely an adult, Eleonore Varga stood alone. It broke something in me to see her standing there, her face scrunched in grief as her knees buckled and she fell strewn over the top corner of his casket. Something about it all became real then, as my father, my uncle, my cousin Hans — who stands at 6 foot 7 and is built like a refrigerator — all broke into tears. For the first time it was concrete in my mind, Papa was, indeed, gone.

From that point onward, Hans and I have done everything we can to make sure that Oma is okay. My family has taken to having her over for dinner at least once a week and attending mass with her on Sundays. I asked her to teach me Schnappsen, an old German card game, which Papa had taught to my two older cousins, but never to me. She. at first, was reluctant, saying it wasn't right to play without Papa, but on account of her being the best teacher left, she consented to teach me. Soon she began to smile, and with her smile came stories, and with the stories came sentiment, emotion, memories, and she again fell into tears. Hans and I put our arms around her shoulders, our grandmother who our whole lives had seemed decrepit and immortal all at once, like some kind of an obelisk in the sand, now so clearly frail, and held her tight, unable to even comprehend her sorrow, the love of a wife, perfected.

Don't worry, Papa. We'll take care of her.