We headed back to the Netherlands for René’s birthday, but not before a quick stop in Bonn for a research colloquium.
We just happened to be in Bonn at the same time as the new BUKA selection meeting, so Rainier and I recorded a little advice for the new fellows bringing kids to Germany.
Our first month in Europe has been one of excitement, exhaustion, celebration, and mourning. In the same week, both René and I bid long-distance farewells to our grandmothers. The heartbreaking, yet enlightening, truth that I can not forever share my grandparents, people who have loved me most, with my child, whom I love most, struck me like a ray of sun on a clear cold day – painfully blinding yet warm.
Without Maw Maw Marion, there would be no me, and without her death, Rainier would have no future. I question death, and naturally, life; the made-up words in which we try to contain them, suck. I think of Alan Watts’s description of our skin as tiny holes that connect us to the rest of the universe.
And with that feeling of connectivity, I celebrated my 33rd birthday in Amsterdam with René and Rainier, and new friends from around the world, and Maw Maw Marion, and her grandmother too. And I smile knowing that she would not have had it any other way – with big pieces of her in a canal-filled city.
Duffourcs in Deutschland 