rust in vrede Oma

today is not a good day. yesterday wasn’t either. i think that’s what happens when you’re finally left to sit with your sadness – there’s no escape. no distractions. there’s nothing but you and your feelings. it’s been two months since my Oma passed away and instead of it getting easier, it’s getting harder. harder because the reality of never seeing her again is sinking in. harder because the reality of never talking to her again is sinking in. harder because i’m not only grieving the loss of her, but i’m grieving who i was when i was around her; the person she made me feel i was and could be.

i’ve wanted to write about her passing for a while now but i didn’t know what to say. so instead, i’ll attach the speech i gave at her celebration of life on the 29^th of June.

Oma,

How fortunate to have had a grandparent you never dreaded seeing, but always looked forward to seeing. That’s how I felt with you. You living around the corner was the best thing for us growing up because we got to see so much of you. I know Mum appreciated the spontaneous visits (and cleans!) as did I…even though it would quite often be accompanied with a phone call… “Oma…where’s my soccer shorts?!”

I always looked forward to Friday nights – chicken soup, omelette, a glass of milk and some chocolate followed by a sleepover where I always found myself rolling into you because of the small weight difference.

You were always heavily involved in my life – helping out at school and coming for craft days with Mum or even ironing every piece of clothing that was washed, yes even undies. You really did take care of us didn’t you?

You loved your routines. Cards in Glenelg. Hair cut at Clipjoint in the city. Catching buses everywhere. Who needed Google Maps when there was you?

I loved how easily you ‘moved’ mentally when things were explained logically. You never seemed too concerned with gossip and didn’t take anything too seriously.

When I lived in the US, it was you who I missed the most. We used to have the ‘you hang up’ ‘no you hang up’ kind of love. Every time I came home to visit, I wanted to spend most of my time with you. Taking you out for lunch, going for beach walks – Wednesdays became our day. I loved talking to you and I think you enjoyed talking with me because it was always about things of substance, never about nonsense. I asked difficult questions. You answered. I wanted to get to know you, and you me. And get to know each other we did. You became my best friend Oma. My person. You’re the first person who I felt really got ‘me’. That’s why I always wanted to sit next to you at family dinners – we could talk about things that mattered or we could laugh at the ridiculousness of each other. You were my pal. My comfort. My safe space. You brought out the best in me, as childish as it would be at times, but I was happiest when I was with you. 

You were adored by everyone. Neighbours, loved ones, and strangers alike. You had a warmth and a smile that instantly made people feel at ease. I think that was my favourite quality about you – your total acceptance and absence of judgement. You loved people as they are. As you loved me for me. Every weird, quirky, stinky facet. How lucky I was to be loved by you.

The one thing that always stood out to me though was your unwavering strength. You survived World War II, immigrated to a foreign country whilst leaving your lover behind, suffered devastation and heartbreak in more ways than one, yet you could never tell that’s what you’d been through. Your scars were hidden. Instead of bitterness and pain, you had forgiveness and openness. You accepted Opa back into your life when you had no reason to. But that was how you loved – unconditionally and selflessly.

We had so many great memories. I used to love the way you would dance to my music. Or we would dance together. I loved the way you would say ‘I’ve never tried this before’ even though you most certainly had. But I think that was your secret. You got excited over the boring. The mundane. The everyday things. You saw them with the novel excitement of a child and I loved that about you.

Covid hit and that was so hard for you – a once always sociable and integrated person, you suddenly became isolated and I think that is when your demise really started to hasten. Falls became frequent. Pyjamas your daily outfit. Your new home became Rembrandt where the beautiful Sanju became your adopted granddaughter. How thankful we are for her.

I’m so glad I had the time with you that I did – we had fun. Even though you didn’t like how fast I would drive. You were my favourite part of my childhood and even adulthood. I got to experience some very special time with you. And you? 90 wonderful years on this Earth.

I love you. We love you. Rest easy Oma. Everyone’s Oma.”

as the initial shock of her passing wears off, what’s left is the gaping hole she’s left in our lives. i’ve always been petrified of death, and i still am. i’m terrified by the finality of it. by the reality that there’s nothing else once we pass. but if there is at all a chance we might reunite with those who have passed, then perhaps dying wouldn’t be so bad. to be with my Oma again, to go for one of our walks, to have one of our chats, those are the moments i miss, cherish, and long to experience again.

grief is hard. and yes, it is a universal experience; we all go through it. but the commonality of it doesn’t take away from the difficulty of it. and this year has certainly been rife with it. first the passing of one of my parent’s cats – Millie, a beautiful old soul of a cat, then the passing of our dear friend Jude – someone we only met within the past 12 months but had an impact of a lifetime. shortly after, my Oma’s end of life care was initiated, and more recently, my partner’s granddad passed away. i know grief isn’t linear, and i also know it isn’t practical to grieve 24/7. instead, it appears in moments of solitude, either at home or in the car, or in moments of remembrance wherever that might be.

i know there’s no ‘fix’ for grief; there’s no before and no after, there’s just the during. and during that process you’ll have good days, and you’ll have bad days. and at the moment, i’m having a few bad days. i miss her. i miss everything that she was. i miss her smile. her laugh. her warmth. her comfort. she was my person. although we can never bring back those who have passed, they can live on in our lives. i suppose that is why i feel so committed to visiting Holland – to see where she lived and grew up. to experience the Dutch culture. it’s also why i’m learning Dutch at the moment too – although i realise it’s perhaps a few years too late.

i never wanted to experience a world without my Oma in it. which is how i feel about my parents too. i know these things are only inevitable, but it doesn’t make the inevitable any easier to accept. i suppose the only thing that can come of this inevitability is the desire to appreciate the present; to always say ‘yes’ to experiences involving those dearest to you. to live not as though you will die tomorrow, but as though those closest to you will. because for many of us, that’s a reality we will have to face at one or more points in our lives.

so here’s to living for those now - to live without regret of wanting more time with them or having had done more with them. i often think my obsession with death and obsession with my own mortality isn’t healthy, but in some ways it allows me to live with perspective. to live with an acute awareness of our finiteness. to live with an urgency to make the most of those around me whilst i still can. to in essence, live.

grief's silent struggle

do your feelings ever just hit you all at once? i suppose when you’re constantly surrounded by people, you suppress your feelings. not out of fear of being vulnerable or authentic, but because sometimes it’s not functional to be constantly so emotional.

that’s how it’s felt this past month. we lost someone close to us earlier in the month and naturally with loss comes grief. but grief is a bit fucked up. it’s never linear in its process. and 99% of the time we just continue with our lives as though nothing has really changed. and externally, it hasn’t. but internally there’s a loss there that only few of us are feeling. it’s like a silent battle. and the times where it hits us the most might be times where it’s not really appropriate to break down. maybe you’re serving a customer. maybe you’re mid-session coaching a team of men or junior girls. maybe you’re just going for a walk in public. regardless of the occasion, we often suppress these moments until a suitable time when we’re alone. and then it comes out like a tsunami of emotion.

i suppose that’s where i am now. sitting alone in my car, feeling all the things i’ve tried tried to ignore. things often too hard to articulate. or too hard for others to support. so instead of sharing, you keep to yourself. conscious of being a burden or a black cloud to others in your life. there’s only so long that people want to hear the same story, instead we often tell a narrative that ignores the heaviness or the pain out of consideration for others. but all that does is a disservice to ourselves. because that pain remains.

the thing with losing someone is that it makes you think about all the people, and pets (if you have them), who are still near and dear. it makes you imagine a life without them. for those of you who have read other blog posts of mine, you’ll remember how petrified of death i am. how incomprehensible i find it. so to be forced to confront the reality of a life without those dearest to me is a heaviness i often silently carry on a daily basis. it’s not really a dinner conversation now is it?

what’s been compounding these feelings is also the fact that i’m constantly in pain. six and a half months post surgery and i still can’t run, train, or exercise to any capacity that’s fulfilling. i’ve experienced long term injuries before - acls force you to do that, but this has been different. i haven’t had the progression. all i’ve had is pain. i wake up each morning still unable to bend my knee without pain. i try to demonstrate drills in my academies only to be acutely reminded of the pain in my knee.

sometimes i think i’m just weak and i need to toughen up. if i ignore it, it’ll disappear, right? but that doesn’t work with our feelings so in what world would that work for pain?

for the first few months, i could accept the pain. i had had surgery and the arthritis was really bad. my body needed time to heal. no worries. this also aided in me accepting my retirement and transitioning into coaching - i had made the right decision. but we’re now nearly seven months on and i’m still in agony. i still can’t coach freely. i still can’t get any form of endorphin release. i’ve lost my primary identity - as a footballer, and i’ve substituted it for another one - a football coach. but what i haven’t been able to substitute is the chemicals associated with playing. the endorphins. the oxytocin. the serotonin. instead these happy, good-feeling chemicals, have been substituted for pain. and to be honest, i’m getting a bit over it.

the problem with chronic pain though is no one else can experience it. no one is fighting the daily battle with you. you’re alone. much like your experience of grief. and i suppose that’s where i find myself with these feelings. externally, everything is peachy. but internally there’s a heaviness i’ve been carrying in which i’m not sure how to alleviate. i suppose writing about it is my attempt at offloading some of that.

here's what i wrote shortly after our friend passed away:

grief is a bit fucked up. it hits you immediately but then it wavers. surging at random times without warning. the tragic thing about death is that life goes on. it goes on even though it feels like the world should stop. stop to mourn the passing of someone so important to you. but that’s the thing; death doesn’t affect everyone equally. it affects those nearest and dearest the most. and even then, the pain isn’t equally shared. for most, the passing of someone will just mean they won’t see them once a month anymore, for others, they’ve lost their ‘person’. their outlet. their rock.

how is someone so alive one minute, and then gone the next. i find death incomprehensible. it doesn’t ever feel real. it always feels like you’ll see that person again. but i think that’s because the pain of accepting a reality in which they’re not a part of is too hard to bear.

even when you know it’s coming, you trick yourself into thinking there’s more time. there’ll be more memories. even as the person deteriorates in front of you, we don’t want to accept reality. we don’t want to prepare for the inevitable. it’s a lot less painful to ignore. it’s a lot more challenging to confront. but we always regret the words left unsaid, rarely the words we shared. i suppose that is why i feel so passionately about hand written notes. of expressing gratitude to those, here and now, while they can still hear your words.

we lost someone dear to us this week. someone who only entered our lives in the past year but who made a lifelong impact. Jude’s zest for life was contagious. her passion for football shared. and her knack for storytelling endearing. what a beautiful, loving, and warm person she was. we feel so grateful for the memories we did have, for the time we spent together, for seeing in this new year with her. it still feels so unreal that she is no longer with us. Jude wasn’t just a champion for the teams she supported, she was a champion for the people she supported too. we will miss you and the life you brought to our lives. losing you feels like losing a family member - because that’s what you’ve always felt like for us. i only wish, as i’m sure we all do, that we had more time with you.

i’m not sure what to make of an after life, but i really do hope we get to meet again. in the meantime, i hope you get to meet my Opa and your football brains can keep each other company. until next time x

*this really isn’t meant as a ‘woe is me, life is so hard’ post because life really isn’t bad. i know that. these are just human experiences i know others have experienced, and are experiencing, but perhaps also don’t articulate. grief and pain aren’t permanent. but they do feel pretty shit at the time.

law of averages

what type of driver are you? below average, average, or above average? if i collated the responses of everyone reading this, i would almost be willing to put money that most would define themselves as an above average driver. what’s the problem with that? well, it’s statistically impossible for everyone to be above average.

about 15 years ago, i remember a sports psychologist asking the players in my SASI team this exact question. and, as anticipated, all of us stated we thought we were above average drivers. granted there weren’t any metrics defining what makes an average driver compared to above or below average, but it’s this illusion that we believe we are better than the majority – in social psychology terms, it’s called the dunning-kruger effect.

i was reflecting on this question the other day when considering how many average experiences i’ve had in my life whether it be with doctors, physios, dentists, coaches, coworkers, and the likes. i started to remember learning about the bell curve theory (also known as normal distribution). within this, 68% of the population fall within the first standard deviation – 68% of people are average*.

bell curve source: tom sherrington, 2013, teacherhead, accessed 30 december 2024, <https://teacherhead.com/2013/07/17/assessment-standards-and-the-bell-curve/>

if i take my experiences as a player, that means that for every coach i have, there’s an 84% chance that they’ll fall within that average or below average category. that leaves only a 16% chance they’ll be above average (exceptional [two standard deviations and above] is statistically even smaller at 2.1%). statistics were never my strength in school, so i’ve been re-educated to learn that stating it might take six different coaches (given that 16% is a one in six chance) before i experience an above average coach is actually not mathematically correct. the point though remains the same; the probability of having an above average experience, in anything we do, is very small. why is this so profound?

it's profound because as a society we expect our experiences to be above average all the time. we expect to get above average service at a restaurant, we expect to get above average treatment in a medical clinic, we expect our coworkers or peers to be above average in their drive and motivation, but the humbling reality is that most people we meet and interact with on a daily basis are in fact, average at their jobs.

since reflecting on this fact, i’ve found it to be liberating. and admittedly, it’s something i wish i had realised ten year’s earlier. it would have alleviated so many of my frustrations for wanting people to fall into above average categories when the reality is, most people will not. most experiences will not. that is why it might take you multiple appointments or candidates before you find someone who falls into this above average category. the unfortunate thing is that most people either don’t have the time, the patience, the resources, or the motivation to endure below average and average experiences before they stumble upon an above average individual. so what you find is people either avoid this process by quitting or not seeing medical professionals, or they become jaded and hyper-critical of those in those positions.

i have been guilty of both. i’ve avoided physios and dentists because i haven’t been able to find one i think excels in their profession. but i’ve also been hyper-critical of coaches; wanting them to all be above average all the time when the reality is, they statistically can’t all be above average. being reminded of this knowledge, now, has allowed me to be more understanding and more patient. it’s liberating. that doesn’t mean we have to accept mediocrity and stop striving for greatness or holding people to those standards, it merely offers an explanation for the gap between what we want and what we more often experience.

so, what type of driver are you now?

*assuming a large enough sample size

**please note, what might be an average experience for one person, might be considered an above average experience for another.