Central North Dakota is German country. Lots of German immigrants settled in the area before 1910. Bismarck is named for Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a First Chancellor of the German Empire and a hero to many German people during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Since I know that to be the case, I can’t use what would have now been my first choice of the meaning of the word Bismarck. I could have guessed it was an Indian word meaning The Place Of Sadness.
That is what Bismarck is to me now. This didn’t happen suddenly. It took many years and many events for me to arrive at this feeling.
My connection with the Bismarck area began when my sister, Nancy, her husband, Doug Sande, and Team K² moved there in the 1970s. A few years later, Mom and Dad left the town in which they had lived all their lives and in which almost all their friends lived, and moved to Bismarck too. I was stunned by that move. Never saw it coming, but I guess I should have.
When all of this was happening, my family and I lived in California. We usually made a trip to Bismarck to visit the Sande’s and Grandma and Grandma at least once a year. Those early visits were good. Everyone was still healthy, and we had good times.
Some of the best of those times included the backpacking trips we did with Doug and Nancy to Glacier Park and the Beartooth Mountains in Montana. Those were quality times for all of us. My sister still remembers those trips with great fondness. So do I.
After a few years, some of my Bismarck family developed health problems that changed everything. My parents’ health declined, especially Dad’s at first. Both my sister and Doug were diagnosed with problems from which neither would recover. My visits to Bismarck usually became rather somber events. Some where prompted by medical emergencies and other unhappy circumstances. On some of those later trips, my sister was not the same Nancy who made those wonderful backpacking trips with us.
Then, Dad is suddenly placed in a nursing home. I don’t remember the year. To this day, I don’t know how it was arranged or who made the decision. I didn’t know it happened until after he was in the home. I feel now that I let Dad down by not being more attentive to what was happening in Bismarck. In my opinion, the nursing home was not the best facility in Bismarck. He died there in 1989. His funeral prompted another unhappy visit to Bismarck.
During the late 1990s, at my wife’s insistence, I made annual trips to Bismarck to be with Mom on Mother’s Day and her birthday. I enjoyed spending these times with her, but her health was declining too. Osteoporosis was causing her much pain.
On some of these visits with Mom, I also had good visits with my sister, while at other times, her situation was troubling. Mom was in a constant state of high anxiety about her, which severely detracted from her well being. She was also very concerned about Team K² at the time. Mom was good at worrying about everyone and everything. I have first hand knowledge of that. That characteristic degraded her health all her life.
For awhile after Dad died, Mom lived alone in the condo she and Dad had bought, but her osteoporosis became too severe for her to live alone, so I helped her sell the condo, and she moved into an assisted living facility in Bismarck. She was never happy there, so a year or so later, on her own initiative, she moved into the Missouri Slope Care Facility, a nursing home. It is an excellent place, but she was unhappy being there as well, and visits with her were often exercises in unsuccessful attempts to be cheerful and positive. She complained incessantly about the food. Everything, even the breakfast cereal, was “swimming in grease”. It was so sad to see her in that place.
In 2001, I was called to Bismarck. Mom was failing. I was with her when she died. People said she was waiting for me to arrive before she let herself go. I’m not certain that was the case, but, although a very sad event, it was good to know she was finally free of pain.
After Mom died, our best visit to Bismarck was shortly after my sister and Doug had made their last trip to Europe. It was fun to sit with Nancy at the table in their house on Cheery Lane as she showed us her photo album and, with excitement in her voice, told of all the places they had been and the fun things they had done. This was one of the best visits I have ever had with my sister. It was like, “My sister is back from the dark place!”
Not long after that visit, the specter of the dark place returned. My sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the disease that will shortly claim her life.
So now we are poised to make another trip to The Place Of Sadness. I know it is unlikely to be our last as there may be other sad tasks to accomplish there, but, if Kristin and Elli don’t choose to keep living there, I am sure our last happy trip there has already been made.