Today marks the seven-year anniversary of the death of my grandpa Daily. Less than a year after he died, my grandpa Bartak passed away. Then, a little more than four years after that, my grandma Daily died. And a little more than a year after that, my grandma Bartak passed away. My life—up until July 2002 when I started losing grandparents—had marched on, relatively unchanged. Sure, there had been graduations and marriages, and Brian and I had moved around quite a bit from state to state and home to home, but as far as the major stuff—births and deaths—I hadn’t experienced any, which is a weird and unique thing for someone who was almost thirty years old at the time to be able to claim.
Back then—seven years ago—I would have told you that few things scared me more than change. Tornadoes, maybe. And spiders. And drought. And driving on two-lane roads at night. But aside from those, change pretty much topped the list, because up to that point I had lived a pretty static life.
My mailing address in Merna, Nebraska was the same from the day my parents brought me home from the hospital until I married and moved away to Michigan twenty-three years later, with the exception of a temporary mailing address when I was in college. And for sixty-four years my family has been reachable at the same 643-prefix phone number. I had been allowed for my entire life a special and literal sense of permanence when filling out job and college applications and being asked to fill in my “permanent address” as opposed to the addresses and homes many families far more transient than mine keep for only a year or two or ten at a time. The life of a farm family is what it is, but migratory it isn’t. Throughout my entire life, my parents have lived in the same two-story, hundred-year-old farmhouse located on the land my grandfather bought with the money he earned serving in World War II. My dad grew up in that house as well, in fact, and has lived his entire life there, with the exception of spending a few years in Lincoln, where he attended college and met and married my mom. My grandfather built by hand the kitchen cupboards, and my dad’s childhood handprints are still visible in the cement floor of the unattached shed that we’ve always used for a garage. There’s a wall in one of the upstairs bedrooms that displays nearly a hundred pencil markings charting the heights of my dad, mom, brother, and me (as well as numerous cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends) from the time we were able to stand up straight with our heels planted firmly against the wall until the time we stopped growing upward. And the bedroom my dad used as a child is the same bedroom I used as a child. Both sets of my grandparents were born and raised and are buried in the same county, all within twenty miles of each other. My parents were both born and raised in that county as well. All told, my ancestors have lived in the same relatively small region of Nebraska for five or six generations on both sides, and my genealogy criss-crosses that small-town community like cobwebs and sunrays in an abandoned, ramshackle barn. My mom and dad know just about everyone around those parts and can remember and retell stories of happenings that have long since passed. They know who is related to whom, who owned the corner pasture before my great-grandpa did, who was teaching math at the local school the year the two small towns’ schools consolidated, and so forth and so on. For longer than I can remember—literally—someone has always been there…on the farm…planting the corn and chopping the musk thistle, branding the calves and maintaining the equipment, swathing the hay and picking the green beans and mowing the grass and re-siding the house. And I guess it seemed to me in my naïvete and selfish indulgence that somebody always would be there.
I thought my brother would most likely buy into the business of the family farm, and Dad and Mom would contentedly reside at the homestead on the West Table for an indefinite amount of time, as had my grandparents. Grandpa Bartak was going to live forever, continuing to rise daily at 5 a.m. to walk the pasture south of his house only to return to a batch of Grandma’s freshly baked cinnamon rolls and Paul Harvey’s latest news, wit, and mattress endorsements before going back out to farm and ranch and do what he did better than anything for the better part of the next eighteen hours. And Grandpa and Grandma Daily would live forever in their little house in town, spending time golfing, walking the neighborhood, drinking coffee downtown at the local café, and hanging out with their friends at the Elks club each Saturday night.
But things change, don’t they?
Grandpa and Grandma Bartak are now buried in the plot in Cliff Cemetery they bought for our entire family nearly fifty years ago, and Grandpa and Grandma Daily are buried in the little cemetery in town. My brother chose not to farm but instead took a job in a neighboring town. Mom and Dad have retired (for the most part, that is) and are probably contemplating moving away from the farm to a place where they can go to a movie without first having to drive two hours from home.
I struggle to reconcile the fact that someday my family may be the visiting-from-out-of-town land-owners who bring the grandkids back for a heritage-filled return-to-your-roots kind of weekend. It saddens me to think that someday someone will refer to “Bartaks’ pasture” without really knowing—or caring—who the Bartaks were. And I just don’t like it at all that my kids probably won’t be able to fill in a permanent address on a college application with the full confidence that the home and the bedroom they return to in the summertime will be the same one that housed their childhood games and dolls and toys.
My grandpa Bartak always took pride in the fact that his generation saw more change than any other ever had and probably more than any other ever will. He went from farming with teams of horses to teams of 200-horsepower tractors, and from taking an entire winter to harvest what toward the end of his life he was able to harvest in about two hours.
So, in the spirit of my grandparents’ generation, I spent some time this weekend thinking about change. While I will always miss my grandparents and wish the circle of life didn’t require them to leave us behind, on the seventh anniversary of my grandpa Daily’s death I can reflect on the changes in my life and say that they’ve been good to us. We were confident for the first eight years of marriage that we weren’t ready for children, but the passing of both my grandfathers within an eight-month span left a void that, in my mind, cried out for another generation to begin. And now, seven years and three kids and four homes and six jobs and two-thirds of a graduate degree later, I’m sitting on the couch writing this, attempting to capture a moment of solitude while surrounded by messes created by the biggest and happiest change in our lives, our three children. Things are significantly different than they were seven years ago. But while our lives aren’t as they were, they’re pretty great, all things considered. I’m happy, my family is happy, and we’re all pretty healthy, so I’m learning that while change isn’t always easy, it isn’t always bad, either. Most importantly, it’s amazing to know that no matter what changes occur in this “vapor” called life, we can look forward to an eternal life in Heaven that will put it all to shame.
So today I remember my grandparents. Let’s honor the memory and legacy of the “greatest generation” while striving to create memories of our own, as well as a legacy that will lead us all to a better place when the circle of life comes calling again.
Here’s to my grandparents. Here’s to adapting with whatever changes God has planned for our futures.
The girls couldn’t decide what they wanted to be this year, so they kept switching among Snow White, Barbie, and Cinderella (both the original version and the “bride” version, Delaney informed me). Have I mentioned how sad I’ll be when the “princess” phase has passed and I actually have to help them be creative with their Halloween costumes? Jack just went as Jack, in part because I’m just too cheap and lazy to spend time and money organizing and paying for an adorable costume when what he really needs is some winter clothes, in part because he’s not old enough to care yet, and in part because he’s cute enough already. :) Please enjoy these photos from our superfun Halloween adventures!
