Digital nomad now sixty: Why they invented grandchildren
The first grandchild does change everything, even when you’re on the road somewhere in Italy. Even a digital nomad can get sentimental at times, specially when he turns sixty: sorry for that.
My dad knew he was going to die soon.
He was always a big man. Not only in heart but also in body. But the last half year of his life it seemed like his normally massive head had shrunk and body had grown.
Even though he or my mum told us that the cancer was in remission, looking back on it now, some thirty years later, I think we were more hoping than believing. Still, it is half my lifetime ago, so I might have believed them. Or needed to believe.
Even though my dad was an alcoholic for most of the time we had him, he was also somehow almost a primal force of nature. A shopkeeper’s son from a small village running away in an escape from a murderer and a broken heart, somehow ending up on the east coast of Greenland in the early 50s, where he and his two mates only saw other people, when the supply ship came up the coast. The stories are many, maybe even close to the truth, and not really, what I remember from the last time he came to Denmark from Greenland.
It was the first and only time he got to hold my son, his first grandchild, in his hands.
With him the night he died
He and my mum had come from Greenland to Denmark to see my son. We spent the days together in their summerhouse outside on the wooden terrasse soaking up the frail spring sun and not saying much. Somehow it wasn’t needed.
I don’t remember if it was morning, noon, or early evening, but at one point he said.
- If a man is so lucky to see his children grow up and even get to see his first grandchild, before he dies. he can’t ask for more.
I was with him the night he died in Greenland, the 31st of July the same year, a few months after.
I closed his eyes, after the nurse or maybe a doctor told me, what I already knew.
I don’t know why his words somehow stuck with me. For many years I didn’t agree with him. I believed that a man should ask, desire, and want so much more of life than just a glimpse of the first grandkid. In the last couple days, I’ve started to understand his words a little different.
I will risk that you’ll all think me a tease and promise to get back that part later in this post. It will connect to the next paragraphs.
My son Christoffer and his partner Nina came to see us for a few days with our grandkid, Bille. This is the next installment in my series of articles or post here on Substack detailing our life as digital nomads that began back in April with this post. I can recommend using the Substack-app for reading this and perhaps some of the previous posts.
Don’t leave heat on
And yeah, the heat here in Monteleone Sabino, some 68 km from the center of Rome, hasn’t been turned off yet. The week did hit 38 degrees Celsius and probably way more if the last week is something to go by. I hope that schmuck, who left it on, is going to hit smack in the head with an oversized heating bill when he or she comes back from vacation.
As Bille is some months away from his first birthday, we have been a little conservative, when it comes to being outside. Enjoyed the cool but sunny hours before the heat sets in a little before noon and then retreated indoors until afternoon evening, where we have ventured outside for a longer time. We have equipped ourselves with electric fans and an inflatable splash pool for beginner sized humans. The hardware store only sold them in pink and white. Oh well, Bille was very happy. And his dad, and granddad too. Both grinning like the fishmonger’s cats, after he turned his back to them a split-second too long.
Speaking of the cat, the dog was also pretty interested in the going ons in that big pink thing with all that nice drinking water. And a nice little human to slobber all over too.
Just to get that out of the way, yes, it was one of the best birthdays in a long while. The smile from a grandchild can light up a room like no other. I have no fancy words to describe it. His smile is just so awesome that it’s almost a primal force of his own. Just as intoxicating as the smell of your newborn child.
Just hose it down
Just sitting watching him devour his oatmeal with banana or apple was better than what any streaming service can dish out. Even though most of the food seemed to end up in his mouth, somehow, he gets all sticky and gooey too, which was somehow not a turnoff for the dog.
Good thing that this house is equipped with a white plastic highchair can be taken outside and hosed down. And Bille and the rest of us got another excuse for using the pink splash pool just one more time.
And of course during their stay, my poor son had to endure yet another of my stories about him as kid. He even smiled and laughed politely. It was after all the old man’s birthday, so I got humored. Damn, for a lack of a better expression I am truly blessed with him. The only mistake we made with him, was not having more like him. He is beautiful, inside, and out.
We also talked about they, he and his partner, feel about us going off like that. And he said something along the lines of this:
- Whatever you do, you will have a bad conscience. If you don’t go, you’ll feel bad about that. And if you do, that’ll be wrong too.
Instead, we get to be together in another way than if we were living just a bus ride away. This last week we were together 24/7. We saw them tired out from too little sleep as new parents are, taking turns on who should get up first with the kid and fix the bottle for the night or the mornings. We ate the spaghetti carbonara together and took out the dishes together. Only as far as the dishwasher, I know, but still, it has to count for something.
Loved me despite the distance
For me this way of being together comes natural. Ever since growing up I was used to that there was often an ocean and several time zones between us. Either my mum, my brother and I were at home in Greenland, while my dad was away to Denmark on business or at some outpost on the Greenlandic coast, or later I was in the States and later in Denmark and France for my education. Or my brother was in the States or out to sea. It was just the way things were. Distance has always seemed unimportant to me. Love was the important part. And I knew my mum, dad and brother loved me despite the distance between us. And most of close friends have more or less accepted that’s how I am.
But here is the important part: just because it seems natural or normal to me, that doesn’t mean that it feels normal to other people (who at times have let me know that I am weird) or my kid. And one evening when we were talking about us being on the road, he did tell me that it felt weird, when I moved away from the Copenhagen area, where he and his mum lived. He adjusted as most kids do and it became normal.
Later.
It doesn’t matter that I needed the job at the time, it is a thing that can’t be undone. It is just something that he and I must accept happened and move on. It shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. I can add it to the list of my failings as a parent and use it to try to do better in the time I have left. And that has to be the end of that. I do hope that past sins and the guilt have been atoned for in order us to move forward. I know people even at my tender age still bring up what their mum or dad did decades ago. That’s not just sad. It’s not the best foundation for a good relationship. I learned that myself the hard way with my dad, who as I mentioned was an alcoholic, which was not only hard on him but also on us, his immediate family. It left scars, sure. But he was also one of the most generous, kind and smart people that I have ever met. It just took a while for me to stop blaming him for past sins and failings and for us to move on.
It seems my son is smarter than I was.
Can’t wait to turn seventy for this to be over
Anyway, distance is something to take into account for the future, when we plan the next months of our digital nomad eksperiment. Of course they can come see us, when we hit Apulia or Sicily, but first it’s expensive for a young family with a toddler even if we chip in, second it might not be possible with their work schedules and other commitments. We discussed different approaches on how to remedy this. And my wife came up with a suggestion that we’d might make a detour on our trip to be closer to them. Not a bad idea, we all agreed, so we plan accordingly.
And I know, my son is grown man that is more than quite able to take care of himself and his family, but it feels good to get a thumbs up from him on this new lifestyle of ours.
And here I get back to these words from my dad before his death. I think I have come to understand them as more a declaration of love than a statement of departure. I think of the part “can’t ask for more” not as words of a person that has fulfilled his purpose and can go now, like a wasp in late summer. I interpret them as expression of the ultimate joy of still being able to be together with the people he loved the most, just greedily sucking up that last parts of what was the most important to him, his family.
Anyway this is how I felt, when I sat a table with drops of oatmeal on it and bunch of empty plates and cutlery. It didn’t matter, if there was silence, because everybody was glued to their phone or iPads, or we (mostly just my son and me) were in a loud discussion about politics, where we probably never will agree. It all just feels like home. Even though we are far from any places with our names on the door.
I apologize if this post somehow became a bit more corny, sentimental than original intended. I’m allowed. I just turned sixty. Moist eyes and dementia here I come.
Sadly I have had more moist eyes, almost moved to tears sometimes, after I turned sixty. I can’t bloody wait to turn seventy. Then this sentimental touchy-feely stuff surely must be over and done with.
On a more serious note, I have come to believe that this lifestyle as a digital nomad won’t work in the long run, if we are plagued with a bad conscience that we should be somewhere else. Or if we at intervals must run off to help the kids with something or another. I get that there will be emergencies, where we are needed. That’s why God or some other entity invented the joys and horrors of low budget air travel. But emergencies are almost by definition usually few or even rare.
An apologetic side note
Now why am I writing this in English and not in Danish or German, you might wonder. The answer to that is we have family and friends on both sides of the German-Danish border and in a few other countries, so English seems the right choice (even though I am so very far from mastering this language well enough, for which I apologize in advance). And that means that I sometimes (most of the times) go back and edit and add content, if I find mistakes (many) and remember something that might be relevant.
And a practical side note
Our plan is to post content every week, at least one article every weekend, hopefully more, as we learn new lessons in how to live this new and for us different life. There will be many dos and (surely) don’ts as we progress. Along the way I will also explain in more detail, how we prepared us for this next step in our lives together, as it took a lot of work and endless evenings discussing all sorts of challenges and dreams. You can follow us best at the Substack-app for your phone or you can just get the stories on your mail. Just remember there is back-catalogue of stories for you to peruse at your leisure.
Of course, we will also publish, when we find new places, sights and other things that leave an impression on us. Hopefully that will leave you with a list of this to do or don’t do if you pass by here or if you also want to try something like this. Now the plan is soon as possible to build an app, so you easily can do that. With my limited technical abilities, we need to finance that and other expenses, so in due time we will charge a tiny sum for this content.