Lord have Mercy on my IKEA order

My parents both immigrated to Canada from The Netherlands as young children.

My mom was 9 months old and traveled with her parents (men in one section, women and children in the other) for 10 days on an old WW2 troop boat. My grandmother was sea sick the whole time.

My dad was 7 and flew with his parents and 3 younger brothers. His mother experienced a miscarriage a few weeks before their flight.

Both families left not knowing if they would ever see the relatives they were leaving behind again.

My grandparents spent their teenage years living through German occupation of the Netherlands. Growing up, I heard stories about their experiences regularly.

A Saturday evening with my mom’s parents always brought the comfortingly predictable rounds of snacks and tales of war stories, especially from my mom’s dad, who was taken from his family in the Netherlands to work as a “guest” laborer in what later would become East Germany.

I can picture him with a handful of nuts, half serious and half with a chuckle, telling us how he and other “guests” engaged in deliberate sabotage by continuing to make the airplane parts as the Nazis had ordered them to, even though they knew they were the wrong measurements. I later learned their bravery could have gotten them sent to a concentration camp.

I got used to hearing about my dad’s father who spent 3 years in hiding to avoid being taken to work in Germany, like my mom’s father had been.

One night he lay hiding in a field from a squad of German soldiers who were searching the area for men who hadn’t reported for work, to either shoot them or send them to concentration camps. He was on one side of a haystack when he heard someone else on the other side. He spent the night lying there, fearing it was a soldier. On the other side of the haystack was another Dutch man who thought my grandfather was a soldier.

I wish I could tell the story as well as my grandfather did but basically what happened is that both men were scared “shitless” that the other man was the enemy until the morning when at last one of them crawled out. I can still picture my grandfather stroking his white beard and telling this story, a half smoked cigarette in his shirt pocket (lest you be wasteful and smoke a whole cigarette at once).

During this pandemic, when we’ve all been asked to make sacrifices, I’ve been reflecting on ones my grandparents made when they were younger than I am now.

My husband and I have taken pandemic precautions pretty seriously and think they are worthwhile. But every now and then I get annoyed with the inconveniences the pandemic has on my everyday life. Like the new dining room table I want from IKEA is suddenly not available for shipping.

Furniture shopping aside, the pandemic has been hard. As an entirely extroverted individual, it’s been just a tad challenging to not socialize normally. I imagine I’m not alone.

It’s not normal to avoid seeing friends and family (that you like). To stay 6 feet apart. To wear a mask. To only hug the people in your house. To hear your two year old say “maybe when Coronavirus is over we can do …..”

The reason we have to keep doing this is for the sake of others. For the sake of this country and for the sake of the world. This is not about us and our preferences or “rights.” It is a sacrifice. It’s hard but it is important.

My grandparents were/are not perfect people. They had tempers. Sometimes they nagged. They could, at times, be too proud. No one, regardless of what generation they were born into, has ever been perfect.

Yet every now and then I’m struck by their character and what they gave up, thinking back to those stories I used to take for granted.

I remember my mom’s mother telling me about washing the neighbors’ laundry by hand at age 13. It was so cold, she said, that her knuckles started bleeding. Her payment was a bucket of milk to bring home to her family.

And here I am, frustrated about my IKEA order.

May God sincerely give all of us, myself included, the grace and perseverance to see this pandemic through. That we, like those before us, might be able to make sacrifices for the benefit our community, country and world.