Yesterday, we received the sad news that my 89 year old grandfather in the States passed away. He has been pretty frail for a while, and things had deteoriated so much that he was about to be moved to a hospice. But instead, he passed away peacefully in his home, surrounded by family before the move could take place. Which sounds like the best way to go really.
I'm not close with that side of the family at all as my father actually didn't meet his father until I was about 3 years old. Quite a fascinating story about a US military man that was sent to Fiji Islands for R&R after the war. He fell in love with my dad's mother but the military caught wind of this romance and quickly shuttled my grandfather out of the country as my grandmother was a "native" and inter racial romances were a big No No in those days, and the military wanted to avoid a scandal.
My grandparents wrote to each other and my grandfather tried desperately to get the paperwork together to allow my grandmother to move to the USA so they could be together. Unfortunately, as was common in Fiji back in those days, the paperwork was a mess and she couldn't provide the necessary documents. At some point, my grandmother realised she was pregnant and that the move wasn't possible and so she stopped responding to my grandfathers letters.
Fast forward 30+ years and somehow, my grandfather tracked down my dad. A couple of reunions took place - my mum, dad and I travelled to the States to meet them and that is where I had my 3rd birthday, complete with a smurf cake and a visit from Big Bird and one of the Care Bears. That's what I remember of my first meeting with my grandfather :)
He also came over to Fiji with his new wife and some extended family members and then when we moved to Aus for a couple of years, they popped over again to visit. I think they tried to convince my dad to move to Rochester to be close to them but my mum didn't want to move. She enjoyed the Fiji lifestyle and being close to family in Australia too much. My husband gets disappointed when he hears this part of the story, cos he would love to live in USA and thinks that perhaps our lives could have been different if I just had the American passport. Which I can't get now as my dad didn't get one...But I can still get an Irish passport, so not all is lost :) And like my mum, I can't imagine living so far away from family. Being a 4 hour flight away is far enough as it is!
Anyway, we had all those reunions when I was a little kid, but then life got in the way again and we didn't see grandad for years and years. I think there were a few emails/skype calls in between, but these eventually began to drop off. But thanks to the wonders of facebook, I've managed to stay in contact with a cousin or step cousin (the actual blood connections with the different family members in the States is just too confusing for me to keep track of). And when my husband and I went to New York in March for a 5 day side-trip to our Europe trip, we managed to squeeze in a teeny, tiny trip over to Rochester. And so I got to meet my grandfather again after 20+ years. He sang a Fijian song to me and asked after all the family in Aus and Fiji. Although brief, it was such a special visit and the rest of the family members really went out of their way to make us feel welcome.
And now that he has passed away, I'm so glad that we took that crazy flight that landed there at midnight, and visited him even though we had to leave again at lunch time. We ummed and ahhed before we booked it, and I even said maybe we should give it a miss and we could make a special trip to visit them properly in a year or two.... Guess it just goes to show that you just have to take every opportunity you can and make every moment count because you never know when those opportunities will stop and when it will be too late.
RIP Grandad xo
