I met Ethel Haanpaa in 1971 when I started dating her granddaughter, Becky Shostrom. I was 16. Becky was 17. Becky lived in her own apartment upstairs from her grandma Ethel and her step-grandpa Emil in their chocolate brown duplex on 25-1/2 Ave. No. in Minneapolis. Becky and I were both members at Fourth Baptist Church, which was then located at 21st and Fremont, just 4-1/2 blocks away. We were extremely involved in the youth group and in the church, which was extremely fundamentalist. Ethel was a member of First Baptist Church, downtown, which was more “liberal”. Emil didn’t go to church. He was a retired, union taxi and bus driver. He was a character. We disagreed on just about everything, but we had great, friendly discussions. I learned so much about honesty, character, tolerance and love from this old couple and their friends.
On the morning of the day of my sister’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high-rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.
When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told our priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage.
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