RIP Heidi Husnak (heidih)

[CantCookStillTry]

Sleep Well Heidi. You were always so very kind to me. X

[chromedome]

I'm late to the news, but saw a mention on another thread yesterday. I've had on-thread interactions/exchanges with a lot of eGers, but private conversations with only a relative few. Heidi was one of those.

 

I always appreciated her good-humored (if often exasperated) recounting of her trials with her father and stepmother, and the various health issues and other incidental aggravations that come along in life. She'd have fit in well with my family, where that instinct to find humor in any given scenario is innate and unquenchable (my father joked from his literal deathbed).

 

Having gathered from one of my comments that I'm a bit of a history/current affairs geek, she told me about her own family's history as Donauschwaben, ethnic Germans in what was by then Yugoslavia. The Nazis considered ethnic Germans everywhere to be citizens of the Reich, whether they would or no, and conscripted them accordingly. Between that, and the generally prevailing anti-German sentiment in the immediate postwar era, and the inevitable handful who embraced the opportunity to join Hitler's war machine, the Donauschwaben had targets on their backs after the war and were the victims of a straight-out genocide in Yugoslavia in the late 40s.

It was an episode I hadn't previously been aware of, despite my broad reading, and was both fascinating and harrowing to learn about.

[kayb]

I just saw this. Lord, but I hate to hear it.

[SLB]

I don't know where our Heidi was on the Ukraine mess; but I wanted to discuss clematis with her yesterday, bad.

 

  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/realestate/ukraine-gardener-clematis-flowers.html

 

And, I ordered plants for my spring/summer windowboxes, and I wanted to show her my 2024 orange-theory.  Heidi was kind to me -- specifically, patient --  in a place of myself I discovered at 50.  

Edited February 8 by SLB (log)