My 96-year old grandmother died yesterday in Berlin. Of course, there was some predictability in this, and she had been saying she was ready to go for about 20 years, and she got to die at home, with my mother at her side, so really, it worked out exactly as she wanted it. We’re all terribly sad, but that’s because she was such a cool person.

I hear people complain about how difficult their lives are, as they sit around a table filled with food and wine and I’m clear that we have NO. IDEA. what suffering is. My grandmother survived two World Wars, in Berlin, which has always been a magnet for destruction. Not wanting to die in a city that was being blanketed with bombs, she took her kids to Czechoslovakia as refugees, and would lead them out of the town in the early morning, before dawn, to have them lay down in the fields, because she refused to have her kids at the executions, where the presence of the entire town was required. When my grandfather finally found his family, he loaded them up in a horse-drawn cart, and then ran behind it, so that thieves wouldn’t take their belongings as they walked back to Germany and Berlin.

And then there was the return to a city that had been nearly destroyed – how do you feed your kids? Heat your house? Find enough money to buy the most basic of things? Yet, they all made it, and restored their lives in Berlin, only to see them disrupted again with the building of the Berlin Wall. And learned to live with the fact that your sister and her family were on the “other side” of the Wall…

And then there’s the “normal” things that happen in life – the death of your husband when you’re only 57, losing one of your daughters to breast cancer, another one still alive but lost to schizophrenia, losing your son to a fluke clot in an operation, and then outliving your friends and siblings.

Despite all that, she remained someone you really enjoyed being with – one of her last requests of my mother, when my mother arrived in Berlin a few days before she passed, was for a bottle of Jägermeister! She never took handfuls of medications, she had been active most of her life, and was my inspiration to learn how to speak German fluently. I became her only grandchild who spoke German to her, and she loved it. She was the reason for my first overseas trip at age 12, and my first overseas trip ALONE at 13. I remember a valuable lesson she taught me on that trip, when I had dropped a piece of meat on the floor as we were preparing dinner, and picked it up and threw it away, and she asked why I hadn’t just washed it off. And I saw in that moment how casually I treated food, and that I had never starved in my life and I never did it again. With anything.

She fought to stay in her apartment even when she needed home help aides to help her almost all day (socialized medicine at work, as she didn’t have to pay for any of that), and so she died in her familiar home, with my mother at her side. And still smiling, like she did all her life.

I will miss her madly, and am crying as I write this, but I’m glad she is at peace. Auf Weidersehen, Oma.