Christmas Letter 2014

Blessed Christmas Season and Happy New Year to ALL

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Dear Ones,

This is sent with the hope that you and your families and communities are enjoying these special days; that they have enriched your relationships, extended your love and made memories for a lifetime. As I begin to write and look back on this year I am amazed at the amount and variety of events that have transpired; all the challenges, all the joys, all the new experiences (some that I would not trade at all and others that I could have easily done without). Where does the time go and how does life get so complicated?

Late in 2013 we welcomed Matilda Anne Pleva, daughter of Teresa and Andrew, into the world. She appears above back in October with her adoring cousin Nicholas, son of Kim and Jonathan, and now almost 11 years old. Here he is in another picture with his brother Benjamin who just celebrated his 8^th birthday. Jonathan and family moved from Waterbury, CT to Chelmsford, MA to which he was transferred as a Boy Scout Council Executive. Theirs is a very busy family.

 

Now little Matilda has a new cousin who arrived on November 1, 2014, Harrison Cooper Pleva, son of Heidi and Matthew. He is just adorable and I can’t wait to get my hands on him again. Heidi and Matthew also juggle a great deal in their lives with regular jobs and their shop “Art Riot” on John Street in Kingston. Matt’s tour de force this year was painting an outdoor mural (35 x 65ft.) depicting historic Kingston and the Old Dutch Church. Hard on the heels of Harrison’s birth came the installation of another holiday window designed by Matt for the Blue Cashew shop in Rhinebeck.

 

Teresa and Andrew are about to close on purchase of a house whose history will be a blessing to them. In a few weeks they will moved into 41 Lafayette Avenue, Kingston just 2 blocks from the house in which Andrew grew up and where Matthew and family live now. Everyone really wanted to be near each other and create family for the children. The 1920s vintage house belonged for over 50 years to a couple who were pillars of the church and most generous souls so a loving spirit will surround them there. The house which was very well maintained has an extra bedroom and full bath on the first floor, a wrap-around porch, three 2^nd floor bedrooms and a walk-up attic with some finished space and built-in cedar closet. The new life and new homes are answers to prayer and a call to gratitude at the end of this year.

 

There were challenges too during which the appeal to God was for the gifts of wisdom and compassion. In May my mother who was being treated for pneumonia fell during the night in her assisted living bedroom. She got a bad gash on her head and lay in a pool of blood for a long time. Nothing was broken but she required hospitalization for a week and then nursing home placement to recoup from the fall and the pneumonia. So I searched for a better choice than the 3 other nursing homes she has spent time in during the last 2 years. We settled on Putnam Ridge in Brewster, NY about a 35 minute drive from me and an hour less in travel time then to Tuxedo for my sister living in Connecticut. Rose was still heavily involved in the task of selling my parents’ house. That was accomplished in July.

 

When my mother went to the nursing home she just wanted to be left alone to sleep and had to be fed at meals. We assured the staff that she was walking independently the day before her fall and would come back to life. By the middle of July she had indeed become herself but all agreed she could no longer live safely in assisted living. So Putnam Ridge has become her permanent home.

 

No sooner was the decision made than we learned that her brother, my Uncle Joseph Milazzo age 82, had collapsed in a laundromat in Margate, FL near his home. I flew down on July, 26. His condition was very poor and it was clear that he could not live alone any longer. I worked furiously to get necessary legal documents created, organize his papers, put his condo into some order, dispose of a great deal and supervise his care as he went from hospital to nursing home, back to hospital and then back to nursing home in the space of 2 weeks. Since he was too ill to travel on a commercial plane and I was unable to stay in Florida permanently, we decided to fly him to NY via private air ambulance jet and place him in the nursing home with my mother. They enjoyed a loving reunion in mid-August. But his condition continued to deteriorate. Although we knew his condition was poor we were surprised by his sudden death on October 3^rd. He now rests in St. John’s Cemetery in Queens where his mother was buried in 1932 when he was just 3 months old. My uncle worked hard all of his life as a master carpet mechanic. He never married; he lived well but not extravagantly. He played the market and later settled into reliable investments. As generous as he was in life he could be as generous in death. At this time both my sister and I are dealing with all the responsibilities which follow upon the deaths of both my uncle my father. We have learned a great deal; everything is very complicated even with the aid of lawyers and accountants.

 

My mother is being well taken care of but the sight of her in the Memory Wing of the nursing home among patients with similar dementia symptoms and many others so much farther along the way in their gradual total departure from reality is often difficult to bare. I remind myself that her manner indicates that she is nothing but content and feeling safe. She walks with a walker but is getting even slower. She does not remember that her brother was there and she rarely asks about my father. We worry only about falls and pneumonia.

 

For years I have not traveled too much with exception of trip to Ireland in 2011. This year brought trips to Sioux Falls, SD in January to transfer our sewing business to another community; to Indianapolis, IN for an Association of Contemplative Sisters leadership meeting; to Florida during the summer; and to St. Louis in September for ACS national meeting. While these were all lovely experiences I find air travel very uncomfortable and arduous.

 

A month before the trip to Florida I had hip surgery to correct some unanticipated problems after hip replacement in 2010 – residual pain from a muscle rubbing against the artificial hip joint and also a bone spur beneath it. Surgery at NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases was a great experience – just a 2 day stay.

 

Our community continues to live the blessing of sharing a monastery with the Carmelite nuns. In May we moved our three sisters from assisted living in Mt. Vernon, NY to the infirmary (Lourdes Health Care) of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Wilton CT. Sr. Mary had begun to experience seriously declining health. We supported her through a number of hospitalizations both before and after the move to Wilton. Our much beloved sister passed into the arms of God on December 9. So at this writing, as we decorate for Christmas, we are still processing the loss of our sister. In February, we had supported the Carmelites in their loss of Sr. Michael Ann, a very dear and wise person who was the first prioress of the union of three Carmelite communities which came together here in 1998.

Each day I seem to be playing catch up with the list of things to do; paper work and phone calls for family matters, secretarial work for the community, household chores, managing our various sites on the internet (see links below), writing for blogs and other publications, knitting for our on-line shop and for the new babies in my life. But distractions abound and other things come along to take precedence. I try to visit my mother once a week. When I can I find time to do the writing I am drawn to – opinion or memoire pieces that I publish to my blog, an essay for our Order’s international publication, and lately meaningful obituaries.

 

So often I find myself moving into default mode and thinking I should call Dad and Mom about some article I have seen that would interest them; share a story about the new ones in the family; tell them about something wonderful I found among my uncle’s things; ask for a recipe or practical advice; or seek philosophical discussion of the fate of our world. Then I face the fact that none of this is possible any longer. I have passed into the mode of being the one who receives those calls from my own children who want to share an achievement, recount the vagaries of the home buying experience these days, tell of a child’s new stage of development, or ask about advisable treatment for childhood illness. All very gratifying, but also reminding of years passing all too quickly. Another reminder came in the death of my father’s best friend, Vito Capuco of Annapolis, MD in September. They met at City College in 1948. As I moved among his dear family and their many friends at wake and funeral the memories came in almost overwhelming waves.

 

I look forward to the year 2015 which will include some travel, time to do some things pushed aside for too long. It will include celebration of our Sr. Lydia’s 50^th jubilee of vows; Jonathan running in the Boston Marathon in a fundraising effort on behalf of a charity which emerged from the Newtown tragedy; Teresa and Andrew moving into their new home.

 

Have been praying for all of you throughout  the Advent Season, our Christmas Novena and these days of the solemn feast of the Incarnation. I am drawn particularly to the needs of long married couples experiencing the challenges of ageing, the suffering of refugees and those enduring violence of any kind, as well as the fate of our planet.

 

Thank you for the gift you are to me and for the continuing relationship which is only blessing. Best wishes to you and yours for the coming year. Stay in touch. It means so much.

May God bless us all.    
With the assurance of prayers and with much love,

                                                       Hildegard

E-mail: hpleva@gmail.com

Personal Blog:  MonasticMusingsOSsR.blogspot.com

Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/HildegardPleva

Community Website and Blog:  http:/www.RedNuns.org
Community Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/RedNunsEsopus
Monastery On-Line Shop: www.etsy.com/shop/RedNunsRoberie

Shop Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/RedNunsRoberie

Observations While Walking the Path of Grief



This was their home



The holidays which came in a steady flow this fall repeatedly brought me back to the fall of  2012, the season which marked the beginning of the  end of my parents' lives as they had known them together for 69 years. It is still shocking to think of all that has happened in this last year both in the family of my birth and in the family to which I committed myself 13 years ago. I will leave the list of occasions which brought me to both the heights and the depths of human experience to another reflection.  I will focus on recent    observation of a feature of human grieving.

 



alabaster vase
with carved stone flowers
5 inches high - Italy
 

I am thinking again of my parents and how their lives, as they knew them came to a screeching halt in October of last year when my mother, age 88 and experiencing dementia, was hospitalized for a week. This was followed by a month of recuperation and rehabilitation in a nursing home and then arranging for her to live in an assisted living facility in their town. My father was a devoted husband in every way. The quality of their relationship was recently described by a psychiatrist friend as a 'zipper marriage' - devotion to each other that had a shadow side of shutting others out. It was only my father's realization that he could no longer cope with the day to day reality of my mother's dementia as he experienced his own diminishment in strength and spoke of fully expecting his own death within the year. He died on April 17 at the age of 91 following two and half months of in-home Hospice care and one week in a Hospice residential facility.

 

I am thinking of how their way of life just seemed to explode in a manner of seconds. All of their carefully arranged routines, relationships, obligations, support systems could no longer suffice to maintain things as they had always been. This was crushing to my father.

 



upper frame - my sister and I
ages 7 and five
lower frame my sons and
my parents 1984



In what followed my father's death the beautiful objects, so lovingly, artistically arranged and maintained were propelled from their set order or place; off into the unknown universe; a diaspora of all that was their life. What had been an enduringly cohesive whole atomized, exploded, fractured into shards.

 

Before it all went beyond reach I grabbed at some of the shards, little precious objects that were fixtures in their home and present to me my whole life. A few appear here. There are others: my Dad's slide rules in their leather cases so often seen on his drafting table, the little leather bound boxed chess set no bigger than a small paperback book which he carried with him to the Pacific in WWII and brought back in a duffle crammed with every letter he had received from my mother, a pocket knife, a watercolor painted by my mother. Each item of little value except to me and perhaps, this is my hope, to my children and grandchildren after me.
 



silver sewing kit box from Italy - 3x4 inches

 

However I find that when I look upon them I mourn the loss of the whole. Each object in their home was placed in artful relationship to others, a grand collection in reflection of their lives. These objects, in isolation from the whole, seem to have lost something. It does come to me that the loss represented in these objects seemingly removed from the ground of their being is only a reflection of my sense of loss, of my having been propelled into a new way of being, a new stage of life. No longer in this world is there anyone who came before me. who remembers before me, who can tell the old stories. I am now the elder and that has been a bit of a shock. I feel the burden of holding the stories and the need to keep sharing them, especially with the little ones so that when they receive the gift of these precious objects they will know something of their meaning to those who loved them so dearly.

Helmut Eric Nimke with family
March, 2013

 

The Art of Letter Writing

Letter from Sgt. Helmut "Eric" Nimke, June 1943, to Matilda "Pat" Milazzo
Eric is 21 years old and Pat is 18 years old

 

My father lived into his 92nd year and Mom is plugging away as she approaches 90. Last August 3rd would have been their 70th wedding anniversary. So even though my birth places me just in advance of the official "Baby Boomer" cohort their long lives have brought me late to grieving the death of a parent. Many of my fellow 'boomers" have already experienced this as yet another rite of passage, an experience that brings deep reflection and arrival at a new place in life. I have already experienced the realization that I, wonder of wonders, am now an elder.

This experience also brings many tasks with it. One that has occupied my sister and I for months is that of sifting through all their treasures; all that they saved so they wouldn't forget; all they gathered and kept around for the sheer beauty and preciousness of each item.

My current project is that of organizing and preserving a cache of over 1,000 letters exchanged by my parents from the fall of 1942 to the fall of 1945; from my father's induction into the Army Air Corps and his return from overseas service in Guam (Pacific Theater).

As a student of history, a professional librarian and now archivist, I believe this collection will be a valuable addition to any collection of WW II materials. They will eventually go to a research institution. But now I am reading them, putting them in protective sleeves and then binders. I know the rest of the family will want to see them. But there are so many - eventually perhaps 15 binders - that no one will really have the time to read them all. So I flag the interesting or touching ones, the ones that offer valuable commentary on the way of the military, conditions on the home front, conduct of the war, national and international politics and especially some new insight or revelation concerning family events and persons.

This telegram dated July 2, 1943, four days before scheduled wedding in Brooklyn, NY reads:
 "Darling - Furlough cancelled before my eyes 4pm - Crying as I write this - Am proceeding to
 Key Field Meridian 11:15pm as per orders Adjutant General Washington -
 Even Colonel does not know why - Call everything off - Be a soldiers wife -
Will buck like hell for furlough at Field - Nothing definite - Another wire will follow -
Yours forever - Eric"



This letter is really three pages with writing on both sides of each sheet in my father's very small
handwriting. Written in pencil these are particularly difficult to decipher. But plainly seen is the USO
emblem at the top and the admonition "Idle Gossip Sinks Ships" at the bottom of each sheet.



The love that my mother and father found in each other at such a young age is quite incredible. Their story deserves retelling. More to come.

Steeped in the Past

Matilda Milazzo Nimke 1924

New sidebar photographs come from a growing collection, now swelling with the addition of my father's carefully preserved collection. What does one do with such a collection? Digitization is enabling me to share all of them with everyone in the family and also to use them in unique ways.

 

But what of the process of discovery, looking, studying, remembering, and re-experiencing the past. Every boomer who has had to sift through, organize and distribute the various treasures of their parents knows the complex current of emotions which can threaten at times to just overwhelm.

 

In the past various collections and specific objects found in my parents' home have been written about here. More is coming.

 

BTW - By the way....If you wish to automatically receive these posts in your e-mailbox scroll down the sidebar of this blog and enter your e-mail address in the space provided. Easy as that.

Dioramas in Miniature

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, PA - 1.25 inches across
Matthew Pleva

Heidi Abrams and Matthew Pleva
 

Artist Genes

Prevail

From

Grandmother
 
to Grandson


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My mother Matilda Nimke is an artist. As a teen in    the 1940s she opted to attend a special commercial high school in Manhattan, the School of Industrial Arts. The program was designed to train artists and craftspeople whose skills would be an important resource for the businesses on 7th Avenue, the garment district of New York. My mother, inspired by her aunt and many friends who worked for designers, chose to pursue fashion design. By 1947 she was the mother of two and that dream faded away. Beginning in the 1963 Mom began painting again and taking classes, especially at the Brooklyn Museum.

Here are some of my mother's paintings. She discovered her gift for watercolor, much to our delight. Today Mom has put the paint brushes aside. I used to tell her to "clean less and paint more". Fortunately she did paint more. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will all eventually enjoy looking at her work in their own homes.

In turn I have dabbled here and there. A bit of drawing and painting was overwhelmed by work in the needle arts. Mom exposed us early to all kinds of art and craft media as well as needlework. Many family members worked in the garment industry; all the women sewed; many did knitting and crocheting of the most elaborate kind.

 

Now it is my son Matthew (the middle one) who is making his way through the art world with more training than his grandmother or mother every had (BFA - SUNY Purchase). He also has much more imagination than most people. Here is a Photobucket Slide Show  of his most recent gallery show at the Art Riot, the establishment that he and his lovely lady Heidi Abrams (and greatest support) have created on John Street, uptown Kingston, NY.

 

Scenes of Kingston
 top - home
middle - Old Dutch Church
foreground - Henry Hudson's Half Moon