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Elli Pasanen, beloved grandmother 1917-2010

My paternal grandmother passed this Friday, a few months short of her 93rd birthday.

Though she was born in a different day and age, she in many ways epitomised what a good, modern woman should strive to be: positive, strong, hardworking, loyal, wise, tolerant, yet with strong values and principles. A woman on her own terms long before the world even knew what such a thing was, a real rock for those around her despite her diminutive figure at 149cm (4’11) tall.

Personally, I never heard my grandmother say a single bad word about anyone, let alone lose her temper. She seemed to subscribe to the idea that if you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing. The worst thing I ever heard her say about anyone else was “I don’t think we got along very well”.

As a young mother, she had to raise a young, growing family during the Winter War and Continuation Wars that lasted 5 years, while my grandfather was away most of the time fighting Soviet forces trying to invade Finland.
My grandfather lost some of his best years to the war, and came back a changed man, no doubt tormented by the things he had seen, done and endured during the war. Thus at times it fell on my grandmother to keep the family together, bring up what eventually became five children, and provide for the family through hard work.

Despite these struggles: war, financial hardship, a husband who spent years fighting his own demons before learning to cope, she managed not only to keep her family together, but also make good, solid, self-reliant people out of my father, uncle and my three aunts.

In my grandmothers late 70’ies and early 80’ies, she stubbornly made sure that she alone cared for my sickly and frail grandfather in his last years of life, not because she had to, but probably because she thought it was the right thing to do.

To me, my grandmother was more than just a nice old grandmother, she was like a second mother: as a kid, whenever I was visiting my dad, I would spend the days with her and my grandfather when my dad was off to work, as my grandparents lived just upstairs from my father during most of my childhood.

In many ways, she instilled many of the values in me that I hold dear today: taking responsibility and doing what is right by others, self-reliance: working hard and not expecting hand outs from others, ensuring that your word is your bond and that it can be trusted.
She did this not by holding sermons or being a disciplinarian, but through a million little understated, simple things: tell stories, reward me with my favourite food when I did something smart or inventive to encourage industry and creativity, send me off to apologise if I had done something bad. She rarely missed an opportunity to instill the wisdom that she had gained from a long life.

Like any family, there are probably hang-ups and occasional disagreements, but there is a grounded solidity in my extended family on my grandmothers side that has always made me feel welcome, safe and at home with all of my aunts, my uncle and their respective families, and I think that speaks volumes of the job my grandmother did in making good, decent people out of them despite the hardships they all had to endure. There are many others who would have failed miserably under much better circumstances.

I am grateful for the time I got to spend with my grandparents and all the good memories will always stay with me. Outside of my parents, they were the strongest positive influences on me growing up by a mile.

With the passing of my grandmother, a generation is lost and the world becomes a poorer place. A force of nature is gone.
She will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.