Thursday, November 15, 2012
My name is Ann Marie. I am a friend of Conrad.
I started thinking about the fact that your grandmother lived for 103 years. Her lifespan saw the greatest advances in human history, the year she was born Joan of Arc was beatified in Rome. She was 8 when the US entered WWI, 11 when women won the right to vote, saw Prohibition, the Great Depression, WWII, the proliferation of the automobile, refrigerators, planes-flight!, heck she was alive when the titanic sank in 1912. She witnessed the growth of America into a superpower, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, she lived through every major war and ever major cultural movement of the 20th century and then lived to see the entire world change from the Pony Express to email and robots landing on Mars. She was a living history from the greatest generation the US ever produced. The loss of her is not just a loss to the family but that of an eye witness to the human experience in the greatest century of change ever on earth, that's what made her so great, she was the embodiment of that change, the product of living through all of that. And we will never get a chance to speak with someone who lived through all of that ever again.
