Viking Archeology

 

As I was digging through the layers, I found these old receipts from our trip to Russia in 1999.  Notice that will's signature is "Wilbert" -- the name on his birth certificate.  It turns out we were "early adopters" of Viking, as Torstein Hagen started the company in 1997.

We enjoyed our trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg.  We toured great churches, palaces, town markets, and the World Heritage site of Kizhi Island, with its wooden buildings.

It was on this trip that I finally understood Will's tragic view of life.  The Russian point of view: "Life sucks, so let's just get along and live as best we can with the suckiness."  I realized that my hyper-American speech teacher point of view was that "anything can be fixed."  After listening to Russians and hearing stories about Russia, I "got it."  I also came to realize that it was just this way of being in the world that had made it possible to accept me and love me as I am, rather than as he wanted me to be.  So I came to inhabit a bit of the tragic view myself, and stopped worrying about our differences.

After our trip, Will would make jokes about going out with his "maybe bag." A "maybe bag" is a plastic grocery bag Russians always kept on their persons just in case they ran across an opportunity to get in line for something that became suddenly available, like bread or toilet paper.

He was great at holding onto the feeling of our trips.  After our trip to the UK the following year, we had tea at 4:00 for many months.  

We had many good times together.  I'm so glad we learned to travel to Europe.  The last years of his life, as the dementia ate his brain, he would ask me to remind him of all the places we'd traveled and he seemed very pleased at the list:  Spain, Italy, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Russia.  But I couldn't bear to go through my travel scrapbooks with him.  I left that up to the caregivers.