Pro Memoria Beatrice

Pro Memoria Beatrice

· 5,871 words · 30 minutes reading time 2025 beatrice family hawaii

Remembering

How does a life look when your partner is taken away? I feared, that the moment her life ended and the last breath was done that all these frozen moments we remember start to fade away and eventually would be lost. Grieving brought trust into the process of adjusting while remembering, there is some fading but there is also development in what is remembered. Remembering becomes part of the continuing life which has to be lived. Beatrice's ashes in a little urn in an alcove in her most beloved Jacaranda tree became the starting point of my day, a ritual which keeps me on track and gives me the energy to abide to her last words - you must continue. After more than two years it seemed to me time to not only have a physical place to remember her but also write a blog entry about our time.

A First Meet

On the ski slopes in the Swiss alps, Lenk/Metsch to be specific, in 1976. Her boyfriend, my sergeant in the Swiss military introduced us. A fleeting impression of a nice girl among a lot of girls in these times. Life happened, my two daugthers were born, an intense time with midlife crisis, separation, rebuilding. A lot of time passed, twenty years with brief but memorable encounters with Beatrice among a shared group of friends.

The Caribbian Start

Her first boyfriend hatched a plan around the fact that the three of us all are sailors. He wanted to bring Beatrice and me together on the same boat for Antigua Race Week, a prominent event in a beatiful setting. Although I missed almost half of the time I should have been on the boat for training by chasing a deadline the plan succeeded. After that race week we were an item.

A Freaking Risky Reset

There is a saying that one should only change one of the big things in life, the big things being work, location and relationsship. How about changing all three at once. Beatrice was up for it, the plan was that we all move to a new home yet to be built near her new employer, a software company while living together as a freshly minted family in Winterthur while the centennial as well as the millenial roll over was nearing.

The Hawaiian Dream

Who planted that bug that we could move to Hawaii? It was definitely me but Beatrice took the lead by stipulating that we should at least travel there and check it out. Surprisingly enough then and not surprising at all from the current vantage point Hawaii was so convincing that we took the risk and bought three acres of land on the slopes of Hualalai. This was according to where our hearts were, both firmly planted in software and technology, but dreaming of an agrarian existence.

The Winterthur Years

Nothing fueled our existence more than the dream of Hawaii, in Winterthur more than than ever, a dream so far away with a lot to create in between. First building a new home for the four of us renting a penthouse right at the Winterthur Seen railway station. Scaling everything up, finding a new footing for a lot of things, among them Beatrice's choice to start managing the software aspect of laboratory software deployment as her employment. She went to work on her first day and when she came home we sat on the couch, she opening her laptop and it booted into Windows 95 which was completely unknown to her having only worked at that time with Windows 3.11. We had a few frantic hopurs together that night bringing her up to speed on that machine. Beatric took over the little roof garden we had, a rather hot affair in summer but we succesfully grew grapes and tomatoes, herbs and salads in the shade. After a few years we noticed a new development gaining momentum close by where a series of fifteen free standing single family homes were built. On one of our evening walks we looked closer and decided to move on from our oenthouse to one of those new homes. With a lot of young families being part of that community Beatrice and I started to actively manage the community which brought together twenty two families building a good place to raise kids and have a family. It can well be that this was the training experience we felt we would need when coming to Hwawaii. After all the plan which was shown to us for the development in Hawaii resembled the situation in Winterthur somehow. Sad enough the 2008 crunch and crisis changed the situation in Hawaii fundamentally and to a point where almost no survivors from the initial round of people in Makalei. With the building of a home started in 2008 an intense period of back and forth started. At that time we didn't know the final date when we would switch over as there was still a lot to do in Switzerland.

Lachen As Jumpoff Point

Scaling down was the theme, going from a four person household in a free standing single family home to two persons and relieving Beatrice from the commute. These were the reasons behind the decision to move to Lachen. She fell in love with a pretty plain appartment right at the Lachen railway station. The thing which irked me most about that place was the 360 kiloVolt overhead powerline she never even saw. But Lachen itself is a beauty, pushed back by the upper lake of Zurich and walled in by the promontories of the alps. Never was jogging better than in Lachen, going out with Beatrice on my side in the sun set became a favorite. The commute was short and left more time, a time Beatrice also used to study for her exams as a US lab technician. It was no little feat doing more than five hundred hours of reworking the laboratory knowledge and prepare for the conclusion which came by heading to New York with Nuria and take the US American test, which she passed with flying colors. One hurdle less, granting her with the license to work in the States. In the meantime our EB-3 investor visa was granted and it was time to lift the anchor and set sail for Hawaii. Did we ever wwanted to go to the United States of America? Although we were both very much interested in our twenties in the opportunities across the Atlantic ocean that feeling had soured over time. We never left Switzerland for America, we left Switzerland for Hawaii and this is where our hearts still are.

Living the Dream

If we would have known we would never have risked that much, but isn't it that way for all our accomplishements? A long period of going back and forth while building up the land, a house and then finally in 2013 moving over to Hawaii into our New Home. Strange enough the name for our home has never changed it remained the New Home Hawaii up to todate. One thing though we knew and that was that we signed up for a lot of learning. Coming form a place on the 47th degree of lattitude going to live on the 20th degree means there is one really massively changing parameter, namely the weak expression of season, Hawaiian agriculture being technically subtropical is an all year round affair. We looked forward to it with joy and being relieved from the heavily season dominated weather back there. But this also meant no pause, no time to rest, whatever green we had, be it wanted or not so much grew with unprecendeted speed and persistence. Beatrice started her new professional life by using her newly acquired laboratory technician license in Kona Community Hospital's lab and was sent through a grueling training. She soon transitioned into running nightshifts becoming one of the two night persons manning the station year in and out. We learne that nightshift work is a team effort which dominated our life to the core. But we succeeded in meshing software development, laboratory work and building up a farm from scratch such that by 2018 most of our trees had been planted. We could feel the change insofar that we cut down more wood than we planted, the pendulum definitely had started to swing back. While living the dream we were lucky to enjoy good health well into the Covid years. Beatrice's work load increased exponentially with the laboratory already being short staffed and under pressure with ever changing requirements and procedures. We were lucky as on the farm we could easily limit contact with people. Being outside became an even better way to be free of all the distancing burden and sorrows of nghtshifts, masked shopping and weird interactions.

A Special Place for Coffee

Hawaii's coffee is well known as one of the elusive specialty coffees on planet earth. Living in place on the flanks of Hualalai is practically an obligation to farm coffee. Our environment when we moved over had fifteen coffee trees in the upper north corner gifted to me a day before I flew back to Switzerland for another three month period. I planted these trees in all haste before going to the airport, even building out the automated irrigation which was sorely needed in these years of drought. They were still there when I came back, asking for more, so I planted more. Coffee became the specialty of Beatrice loving being among her trees. We never pushed the limit and stayed on the complimentary side of a crop with about two hundred trees in production. This allowed for a fine tuned set of machines and procedures to farm and process coffee which Beatrice could handle all on her own. Drinking our own handcrafted specialty coffee every morning became the ritual on days off from the lab.

All the Love for Breadfruit

Shortly after the pouring of our slab our friend and later contractor George gifted me nine breadfruit fledling trees coming from a nursery in Maui. Our land was overgrown with eight feet high Guinea grass, a pest around here, and false Acacias or Haole Koas derisively. I cleared a strip of land along the lower street side berm and gave the trees a new home. Little did we know that breadfruit was not very common at that time. But we bought into the old saying which says that one breadfruit tree feeds a family. What then can go wrong with nine of them? Eventually and after eight years we saw the first fruit appearing and started to experiment, leaving nothing out what can be done wrong by cooking with that very special treat of mother nature. Seeing the potential even more so with the advent of the 'Ulu Coop we now have about twentythree trees producing with breadfruit these dasys being a cornerstone of our existence.When experimenting gave way to sound recipes we started the tradition to bake our bread with breadfruit and if there's a distinct point in time to remember Beatrice then it is when I bake my weekly loaf of sourdough breadfruit bread.

Cancer Stricken

If we learned one thing the hard way then it is that mother nature does not tolerate things going up indefintely. Where there is an up a down will follow. Within two days both of us received a cancer diagnosis, with Beatrice getting a quite optimistic prognosis. The fight was on, chemotherapy started with us learning how to deal with such a situation. But little did we know that her therapeutic regimen somehow and for unknown reasons missed the point. End of 2022 it became clear that her growth had not shrunk according to the books. She grew restless and bought a ticket to Switzerland arriving there early in 2023 only to end up in the hospital, being imaged with a devastating result, her body being riddled with metasttatic growth. Fighting for some family time and eventually returning home to Hawaii the downturn developed into free fall. After detecting massive growth in her brain she drew her last breath on the 19th of March 2023.

Remembering

Is this the right way to help people remembering? I created the family blog with the idea of having a place to put the occasional snippet out of my life in a place where it is exposed to the most powerful system humanity operates, the Internet, which does not forget anything. Not forgetting is the most powerful but also the most dangerous and destructive feature the Internet has. I selected the images out of our huge archive such that Beatrice is in every picture. There are of course also lots of other people in these images from which I do not have requested the permission to expose their personae to the Internet.

Should anyone want to include more pictures or object to her or his picture to be published in this context then please drop me a message.

The last picture of Beatrice