Last week, two residents of the long-term care facility at St. Joseph's Hospital celebrated their 100th birthdays. They are 100 years old now!
Unfortunately, I couldn't talk to them, but I spoke to people who've known them for years. Both Selma Gall and Father Lucey had unbelievable, interesting, full and exciting lives. But can it be any different after 100 years in this world? Especially when most of those years fell in the 20th century.
Until recently, I didn't know anyone who would be 100 years or older, so I never had a chance to come close to live history. Talking to people who've witnessed it all, or those who heard their stories first hand was precious.
When I was a teenager, I liked spending time at old cemeteries. We have a lot of them in St.-Petersburg, and most are at beautiful locations, so it was more like visiting an open-air museum rather than something creepy or strange. Besides, when we went there, the family grandma always said that I should be afraid of living, not the dead. And I listened.
Our graveyards differ from what you usually see here. They are more chaotic, as every family finds their own way to express their grief. Most tombstones of various shapes have pictures. Often there are small poems or personal phrases next to names and dates. But others just have a cross with names and numbers.
Sometimes I walked between graves of complete strangers and read the dates, trying to imagine what their lives could have looked like based on what I knew about the history of that time and assuming that most of their time they spent in the same city. And those who've seen the most part of the 20th century always appeared as real heroes to me.
Back home those born in the 1920s were people who came to this world during the bloodthirsty civil war when many countries on the continent were being glued together and ripped apart at the same time. They witnessed all waves of Stalin's repressions when wrapping food waste in an old paper with a picture of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could easily cost someone 10 years in a work camp in Siberia.
Those were people who lived through the war. War was in their backyards, no matter if they were in St.-Petersburg (Leningrad back then), Yekaterinburg (Stalingrad back then) or hinterland where half of the country that turned into a battlefield evacuated to. Those 20s babies had to rebuild the country after the war, and then watch it shut down under the iron curtain and live in a parallel degrading corrupt communist universe until all they originally knew fell apart in the 1990s.
People who lived long enough saw chaos and total lawlessness roaring on the vestiges of their country at the end of the century. They saw the change and hope and then degradation again. They saw enough to write 100 bestsellers, and for them, it was just life.
I know way less about Canadian history, I'm still learning. But I know that the life path from the 1920s into the 2020s is always impressive. Here many people born in the 1920s probably were kids to silent heroes who fought in the Great War. They grew up during the 30s, knowing what hunger and poverty are first hands. They knew how ghastly and dangerous simple dust can be.
They were builders of this province and the country. They fought in the Second World War or felt the terror of it echoing in this part of the world. They worked hard to have decent lives, and not always was their work rewarded, but they kept working.
I often think of life as of kaleidoscope, where every year or every period of time is a separate glass piece. When it's adjacent to the previous and following years, it doesn't look like anything special, just a part of life. But when looked at separately it becomes unique and extravagant. Another turn and in retrospect with all the long-term outcomes it looks different again.
Like in a kaleidoscope, when you come back to your years at different seasons of life they often get a new meaning. And if look at broader history, you would find yourself in a bigger and much more complicated story. But every piece of "glass" is priceless, and to learn something from people who actually were there is an honour. Unfortunately, too often I forget about what it feels like and miss on opportunities to join in live history.
With all that said, I called my 83-year-old grandma and set a date to talk about what she remembers about her tender age that fell on the toughest 40s and 50s.
