Ruggie died in 1973 before I (Solveig) was born, and I just realized relatively recently, how hard that must have been for her. She was only 25 when her mom died, and it was right before she was about to have her first child. I never thought about this loss being such a blow to her, because I always thought of it as if "she was a grown-up already." She was our mom. "Now if she were a _kid_ - that would be hard!"
In my Motherless Daughters group, so many people who are mothers now, talk about how hard it was having their children without their mom around.
We got to see Grandpa Dahlen quite a lot because Mom and Dad moved back to North Dakota from Wisconsin. We only lived about 2 hours drive from Grandpa, so we got to visit "Whynot, Minot" and I learned the exact order of all the towns from Bismarck to Minot. Riding in the backseat with a backpack full of books, I also pored over the map quite a lot.
When we moved to Valley City in 1982 we were about 2.5 hours further away, but we still got to see Grandpa fairly often. When Mom got sick with the meningitis in 1986, Grandpa started coming down to see her every week.
He would drive all 5 hours down and have lunch with us, and then drive all the way back the same day.
On the religion and Confirmation topic - we remember her being a lot more serious about religion than Dad is, but we didn't go to church at all until we started Sunday school. We heard that she really liked our Valley City church (Our Savior's) because it reminded her of First Lutheran Church in Minot. And then when we visited First Lutheran, I think for Grandpa's recent funeral, Kati noted that they are very similar.
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