It’s the 18th of December, and we haven’t hung a single ornament or strung a single string of lights. It’s been a very difficult year. We began in January with the loss of my beloved stepmom Mary Roesner Bjorling. Mary had been suffering with heart failure for months, and we knew her demise was inevitable, but the loss was no less real. With Mary’s death, we both lost the only remaining mother figure we had. When the family selected September 12, 2021 as the date for Mary’s Celebration of Life, we knew we had to be there if at all possible.
Most of the first eight months of the year were spent in agonizing doubt; we knew Bob’s brother Tink also had a failing heart. Could we get all our COVID vaccinations? Could we make travel arrangements? Would we make it to America in time to see Tink before he died? Arriving in America August 20th, we fidgeted while we put necessary things in place in Illinois before driving twelve hours straight on August 27th to Medina, NY, where we met Tink at a restaurant. God’s timing was perfect; we spent Friday night and Saturday morning with Tink. Sunday morning August 29th we spoke to Tink on the phone as we were on our way to speak at a church. That was the last time we got to tell Tink that we loved him. That afternoon we found Tink dead in the house.
The following day, the 30th , as we were trying to come to grips with the realities of Tink’s death, our long – time friend Joshua Beso died in Ghana. Joshua was one of the original nurses when we first came to Saboba and headed our Public Health Unit for nearly 20 years. Joshua’s final funeral just took place one week ago.
When we went to America this time, we spent nearly four weeks total with my brother Russell Bjorling and his wife Carol. We were able to connect in a way we hadn’t during previous visits, and we shared lots of small blessings. I realized how much Rus and I were alike, even to our fondness for accessing comics on the internet on a daily basis.
Rus and Carol were both fine when we left their place to head south in mid – October. Little did we realize that scarcely one month later, my funny, compassionate, nurturing brother would die with COVID pneumonia while my sister – in – law would be struggling with health issues as well.
When my brothers Rus and Dale and I were growing up, Christmas time was also fruitcake time. My mom was a wonderful baker, and her fruitcakes were delicious! Mom would generally bake the fruitcakes in late October or early November and then anoint them with something alcoholic until Christmas. Having any kind of alcoholic beverage in our household was highly unusual; generally, ours was a dry household. When my parents were responsible for buying the communion wine for Immanuel Lutheran Church, they would slide into a liquor store, buy Mogen David wine, and slide out as quickly as possible, lest someone see them and decide they had become closet drinkers.
In our household, there were two kinds of fruitcake, white fruitcake and dark fruitcake. The white fruitcake had lots of candied lemon and orange peel, plus candied cherries in it and might have pecans or almonds as well. The dark fruitcake was made with molasses and fruit juice and generally had raisins, walnuts, small pieces of apple and some other dried fruits.
When Mom died in 1980, Rus took over the title of Fruitcake King. Rus did much of the cooking in his household, and fruitcake at Christmas was one of the traditions. Although I am an excellent cook and baker, my duties as a doctor in a bush hospital have left little time for baking fruitcake. And there’s a real supply chain problem; getting candied fruit in Ghana is a real challenge.
Rus’s medical condition was beginning to worsen as we left the U.S. on November 10th. At that point, fruitcake ingredients were the last things on our minds.
Now it is Christmas time and we continue to remember Rus for the little kindnesses that he did routinely. We will celebrate our Christmas quietly, but it will be without fruitcake.
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