Catharina Johanna Schmidt (nee Paardenkoper) 1919-2009

My grandmother died today, July 9^th, 2009. She would have been 90 on December 22^nd. I hadn’t seen her for many years and had only spoken to her once in the last year (her memory was failing so she wasn’t sure who I was) but I never thought this moment would come. I thought she would live forever. Apparently this is quite a common thought amongst people. Oma was a big presence in my life for many years. When I was a baby I spent a lot of time with her because my mother had only just turned twenty when she had me, and when Oscar and I first moved to the U.S and until fairly recently, she always helped us out with money. In fact, I’m not sure we would have made it if it had not been for her help.

Oma was very particular. She liked the best of everything, a trait she has passed on both to her daughter (my mother) and me. She also passed on to us her love of organization, neatness and cleanliness, and I almost have a phobia about touching money, especially change, because she drilled into me how thoroughly dirty and disgusting it is, after “all those people having touched it.”

Oma was a snob too, but she was very well informed, reading the paper every day well into her seventies. And I also remember her being very open compared to a lot of my friends’ grandmothers. She liked dirty jokes and was known to swear like a trooper on occasion. But she didn’t like us to swear so she would tell us, without a trace of irony: “Don’t fucking swear.” I remember feeling perfectly comfortable discussing my period and certain aspects of sex with her. I remember how we’d watch the Jerry Springer show and roar with laughter together. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped staying with her regularly, but I do know that she would always prepare for me, in the evening, an open-faced peanut-butter sandwich cut up into bit-size cubes. I loved that – it made me feel so coddled. I would never prepare it like that for myself. Food was always a big pleasure at her house. I loved her cooking and we always had “snoep” (candy). The other big joy (which I still love to this day) was shopping. We would literally shop till we dropped and I can’t imagine a better place for it than Den Haag. Although of course I’m sure there are better places, but that is of no consequence.

Until I was well into my teens I would share her double bed when I stayed with her. I would wake up in the morning to the sound of her little radio, which she would be holding on her chest. A pinky inserted in the corner of her mouth and a frown of concentration on her face, she listened to the morning news. When I was a small child I loved watching her morning ritual of “putting her face on.” She had endless amounts of little bottles of make-up and perfume which were utterly fascinating to me. People would often mistake her for my mother.

Oma was married to a prominent figure in Dutch politics and in the United Nations. He was twenty-three years her senior; her father’s best-friend. My grandfather, Petrus Johannes Schmidt, died when my grandmother thirty-three (my mother was five) . He co-wrote the Declaration of Human Rights at the UN and they were frequent house-guests at the Roosevelts’. After his death my grandmother never re-married and she brought up her two children, my mother Petra and my uncle Edo, by herself.