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2009 was a watershed year for the three Kimball kids and their educations.  All three of us started new schools in Chicagoland and began to taste the commuter lifestyle a bit more.

After being accepted to every art school she applied to, Jenny decided to attend Columbia College downtown.  Honestly, I was a bit surprised and mystified by her decision.  She had spent a significant amount of time apply for and being accepted into fine arts schools, including the School of the Art Institute at Chicago, apparently one of the best art schools in the nation.  Columbia on the other hand, had open admissions. Literally everyone is accepted.

Nor is it particularly cheap, or is there any of those normal childish reasons for wanting to go.  None of Jenny’s friends were attending, she didn’t have a particular fascination with downtown Chicago and certainly didn’t feel a need to stay close to the family.

Then she chose video game design as her major, despite not being half as interested in them as Jon or me.  Besides not being an avid video game player, she didn’t take an interest in video game culture, history, or industry.  We had a lot of dinner table conversations where I was unable to ascertain the reason she chose video games.  Honestly, I thought it was all a big mistake that she’d end up paying for with her youth and my dad his money.

But I became impressed with the classes she was taking.  One of her first classes was C++, which upon her successful completion, means that she has more programming training than me.  Another class was Chinese, which is something I’ve been trying to get my siblings to study for a long time.

So I slowly changed my mind about her decision, instead of lamenting her (probably unemployable) degree, I found myself proud of the classes she took.  Now she has a taste of the development challenges Jon and I run into every day, and an inkling of her Chinese roots.

In the end, it seems like her degree in video game design might actually bring us closer, and it is nice that she’s still at home.

The oldest, and most telegraphed of the three passings this year was my Grandma’s.  We’ve known for about a year or two that she was suffering from cancer, and her condition had notibly deterorated from about spring onward.

Grandma was adventerous, often worried about us kids, and religious.  We had been making the most of her time left, planning a slew of family reunions and bringing in relatives from California and Hawaii, but only my younger sister saw Grandma in her final bed ridden days.  Still, she had copious amounts of cheer.  A devout Christian Scientist she accepted and wasn’t afraid.

She passed away at the end of summer, with her two sisters by her side.

At her house in California, we held a non-traditional funeral with music and food stations spread throughout the pool deck area and the living room, per her request.  It was like a get together, and a surprising amount of people came, invalidating my theory that the older you get the more you lose contact with people.  Some people came to honor my Grandpa, who passed away when I was a kid.

Grandma’s death fell upon me numbingly.  During one point in her life, she moved to Clarendon Hills to try to connect with us grandkids, but it was largely a failed attempt.  The generation gap was just too large, and although I now appreciate her attempts to culture us, at the time it was just a bother.

We thought she was a bit too uptight, along with the rest of our religious relatives.  While preparing for the funeral, my extended family further treated us like children, which only served to divorce me from any pain of her passing.  Jon felt the same way, but spoke the truth when he said, “At the very least, she’s responsible for our being.  We owe her for that.”

This left my dad as the de facto head of the Kimball family now, as the oldest male.  Living in Chicago, he wasn’t able to be with her at the end, and he spent his time working on the CB360T engine in the garage.  When he got the call that Grandma had passed, he was cleaning out carburetors.

Grandma’s death illustrated to me a lesson in aging and respecting the elderly.  At the get together, the slideshow showed she was a beauty queen as a young adult.  The remarkable American beauty was nothing like church going senior citizen I knew.  It’s sometimes hard to believe that every geriatric walker using pensioner was once a rebelious 20 something with dreams and a probable disrespect for authority.

I just wish I got to know that side of her better.

Mr. Helms was my friend’s dad, but treated me like an adult and peer.  We always chatted when I visited Chris’ place and when I began working at the same place as him, we sometimes had lunch together.  He’d ask me if Chris and I still hung out which I always thought was a funny question considering I saw Chris about every weekend and talked to him daily on the forum.  Mr. Helms offered his support for my career, and although we were in different departments I really felt like I had someone who had my back.  Having him there to confide in about how much I didn’t like my job meant a lot to me.

When I first started at my current position, all my much older co-workers said that their hobbies include “Nothing” and “I have kids”, which depressed me when I saw that my career path and life led to them.  But Mr. Helms proved to me that old dogs can learn new tricks, and I found comfort in the fact that growing up doesn’t mean settling into a lifetime of TV watching and driving your kids to soccer practice.  I admired him so much more than any adult I have ever met.

It wasn’t just that he played the guitar, worked on classic cars, or built models… it was that he learned to do many of these things while an adult with children and mortgage and a job that was neither glamorous or full of riches.  He had his dream job once, and sacrificed it. He sold his ownership in his hobby store to spend more time with his family, in the process taking his final job at the place I work for steady money, security, and benefits.

One day while at his cabin early in the year, Mr. Helms passed away.  He was decently fit, and had no overarching medical problems, so his death struck swallowed up our group like an earthquake.

I had always hoped a part of him would be reflected in me when I grew older, but when he passed I thought about my own dad.  The funeral reminded me of the fact that my father will die one day, but I do believe that it is every father’s goal to die before his son, so even in death, Mr. Helms succeeded.  I also think it’s fitting that he passed away at his cabin, away from the suburban two car garage and Metra commute.  I think he would have wanted that.