On July 18, 2024, my brother Lawrence died at the age of 51. He was probably never in good physical health for the duration of his life, but his spirit was the most sincere and positive I have ever known. He had the fortune to die of natural causes at his home. He is survived by his widow, Jennifer. My personal state has been improving.

I now find myself as the “elder” member of the family and the last of a dwindling line. It was my mom’s idea to get the immediate family together, roughly 30 years ago, for the picture included with this post. My brother is the boy in the beret in the upper left of the photo. Going counter-clockwise (the appropriate O’odham direction, by the way), the folks are: my Uncle Herman, my Aunt Margo, my Great-Aunt Ruth (my maternal grandfather’s sister), my Aunt Janice, my Uncle Jim, my Dad, and my Great-Aunt Ruth’s husband (at the time), Floyd. My mom is in the middle, and I’m just to the right of my brother in the photo.

My Uncle Herman, born 1948, and I are the only two left from the people in this photo. My Great-Aunt Ruth, despite being married six times, never had children (that is a whole other story). My Aunt Margo also never had children. My Aunt Janice had a child with her husband, my Uncle Jim, but Kathryn died immediately after being born due to in vitro development complications as a consequence, the doctor guessed, of my Uncle Jim’s exposure to Agent Orange. My brother had no children.

In order of passage from this life, the deceased seen in this photo are:

Aunt Ruth - 1914 to 1996

Uncle Jim - 1952 to 2009

Mom (Lorna) - 1948 to 2010

Floyd - 1924 to 2011

Dad (Wolf-Dieter) - 1944 to 2013

Aunt Margo - 1956 to 2019

Aunt Janice - 1949 to 2023

“Lonnie” (Lawrence) - 1973 to 2024

O’odham was the first language for five of the ten people in this group. German was the first language for my dad. My great-aunt was alive during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 that took her older older sister and two older brothers. My Uncle Jim suffered from PTSD and physical tremors from nerve damage from combat in Vietnam. Poverty and wealth were experienced by everyone in the photo, relationships were begun, grown, and occasionally died, and the reaches of the world were explored. There is history in this photo, and I am obligated, at least for the benefit of my son and, with good fortune, his children, to recall the experiences, perspectives, and beneficial values of the family with which I was lucky enough to have been blessed.

Next up will be a eulogy, of sorts, for my brother then, in the spirit of the Halloween season and to “honor” my Aunt Janice, I will recollect some “spooky” stories from our family’s experiences in O’odham Jewed over the next few days.

Looking back, I was so inspired to really start (again) to “remember” events occurring in O’odham jeved - then my aunt died. My Aunt Janice was the last surviving member of the preceding generation. She was my mom’s sister, and I was her legal guardian and caregiver. Interestingly, I don’t think I was as close to her as I was to my parents and even her sister, my other aunt, but I’m guessing the cumulative effect of the realization that all my immediate family’s “elders” were gone hit me hard. I have had thoughts and ideas cross my mind to put on Substack, but I have been unwilling (or unable) to put the words out there. This morning I told myself I simply need to write and represent.

Yesterday was the first day of summer for 2024. On the O’odham calendar, it essentially, and for many now, officially represents the beginning of the O’odham year. It is the longest day of the year, the sun reaches its farthest journey to the north, and the life-giving summer rains should begin directly. I have and have had numerous relatives with June birthdays - including my dad’s.

My dad was born in Danzig (aka Gdansk) in what was at the time, 1944, Nazi Germany. Just days after his birth, he and his mom abandoned their temporary home of Gdansk. (My dad’s grandfather, my great-grandfather, was a German admiral with a sister and other family in Stockholm, Sweden, so the strategic port city of Gdansk was a convenient and practical base of operations for him.) My grandfather, a doctor, was working with the Red Cross in France when my dad was born, and he was taken as a prisoner of war shortly after D-Day. My grandmother traveled with my infant father across Germany (after the ship they were supposed to be on that was to take them to Stockholm was torpedoed) down to my great-grandfather’s family home, where my great-grandmother was living, on Lake Konstanz on the border between Germany and Switzerland.

After the war, my grandfather bought property in Weiden very near Cologne (I believe it is actually within the current Cologne city limits, in fact), and my dad and his two brothers grew up there. Rather than “gymnasium” (equivalent to “high school” for Americans), my dad became an apprentice to become a pastry chef. However, as soon as he turned 21, my dad told his parents he was going to practice his trade in America.

My dad could not speak English very well. His French was just a little better, so he first moved to Montreal. Eventually, he made his way to Calgary then after meeting my mom via a penpal introduction, he visited Arizona then married and settled here.

My mom’s father had passed a few years before my dad met my mom. So when my dad wanted to get permission, as was the way, to marry my mom, my maternal grandmother arranged to have him speak to her adopted father, my maternal great-grandfather, in Sells, Arizona. Sells is a remote town/village today. In 1968, Sells was the edge of the world, and my great-grandfather, though he could speak Spanish and English as well, chose only to speak in O’odham. He approved of my father and mother getting married - allegedly. My parents got married, but my dad knew almost no O’odham, and my knowledge of this marriage proposal comes really only from him.

I really have no doubt that my great-grandfather gave his approval and support. I would occasionally travel with my grandmother from Sacaton to Sells (about 100 miles across virtually empty Sonoran desert) to check on her dad and to give her relatives living in Sells some respite from checking on him. As I said, my great-grandfather only spoke O’odham, but what I could pick up was always loving comments about my grandmother, my parents, and me. Those times living with my great-grandfather in 1970’s and 1980’s Sells, though maybe physically and economically difficult at times, were some of the most comforting and secure moments of my life.

(The remains of the great-grandfather’s house still stand, but they are rapidly settling back into the desert.)

After my mom died, I spent much of my time with my dad revisiting past moments in his life. I tried to make a point of taking him to places of importance to him when I could. Not long before my dad, himself, passed away, we were able to make it to Sells. As part of that trip, I took my dad to the Tohono O’odham museum in Topawa and caught the image of my dad basically where his marriage began in O’odham jeved with Elder Brother’s home, Baboquivari, rising behind him. For me, it a tremendous combination of meaning and emotion.

On the last day of June in 2013, my dad passed from this world. I had hoped to take my dad to Gdansk in 2014 for this 70th birthday, but it was not meant to be.

I heard once that most people die within a few miles of where they were born. If I were to die today, that would certainly be true for me. My dad was born in a distant place in a wholly different time. He died thousands of geographic miles from his birth after having heard many different languages and experiencing places and cultures far removed from one another.

Life is lived, regardless, but our choices guide us and sometimes absolutely propel us in unimagined directions. We may “endure” events; however, we choose to condemn or appreciate what confronts and happens to us. I saw very little besides appreciation for life from my family - most now gone from our shared time. I attempt, and even sometimes succeed, to be always grateful for the blessings of life.

My last post was regarding trying to catch the memories of my oldest, and nearly last, living relative - my Aunt Janice. I had ambitious plans to take copious notes after determining and asking specific meaningful questions then try to encapsulate the breadth of a human life in a few writings.

However, two days after my last post, my Aunt Janice died. It was her time. I was not surprised, and to an extent, I was happy for her as her physical health had deteriorated so significantly.

Her funeral was small. She actually did not want anything formal. In her words, all she wanted was for me to “burn her” then “dig a hole” over her husband’s grave and bury her. Funerals are for the living, though, and I coordinated a modest opportunity for her friends and relatives to pay their final respects. It was a peaceful process without drama nor anger nor antipathy.

There was a hiccup when we lost track of where my Uncle’s grave was. The weeds this last spring of 2023, even in the Sonoran desert, were ridiculous, and someone stole the large, heavy wrought-iron cross (probably for a few pennies of scrap value) marking my Uncle Jim’s grave. Consequently, I selected the wrong location for the small grave to be dug for the inurnment. Fortunately (and I believe somewhat divinely), a relative of the person’s grave I had mistakenly identified as my Uncle’s happened to visit the cemetery while family friends were digging. I was informed during the wake, and we decided to regroup at the cemetery before sunrise.

With help from many others - family friends, Gila River tribal employees (cemetery crew), and members of the Gila River and Salt River Pima communities - my identification of the freshly cleared land of my uncle’s grave was confirmed, and a new hole was dug. While our friends completed the relatively quick task of preparing a new resting place for my aunt’s urn, I drove with her remains through Sacaton.

Now, we (my mom, aunts, brother, and I) are all enrolled members of the Salt River tribe, but my grandmother - my aunt’s mother - was enrolled in Gila River, and, as a result of agreement with my grandfather, a house was built in Sacaton in which my mom and aunts grew up and in which I spent the greater part of my childhood. The house is long gone, but I drove my aunt past its former location as the sun began to make its way over the eastern horizon. We continued through the village past St. Anthony’s (my uncle was Irish Catholic) and the remains of the massive, historic “C. H. Cook” Presbyterian church (my great-grandfather was a Presbyterian minister and part of the original “class” of students following the teachings of the missionary Charles Cook, and this church played a dominant role in our family’s lives). I drove past some other locations meaningful to my aunt then made the 15 mile drive back to the Vah-Ki Cemetery.

The plan was to simply to say a final Christian prayer and blessing of committal at the grave then bury my aunt, but my cousin and an elder from Gila River offered to make a final traditional blessing and to sing the song remembering the place “just beyond and before the sunrise” where O’odham go after their physical bodies have expired. The sun was low but bright, and there was a slight breeze circulating the perfect spring temperatures that morning; it was beautiful.

Months later, I still hold regrets that I wasn’t as good a nephew to my aunt as I could have been. I was responsible, in generally regular turn, of caring for my mom, my dad, my Aunt Margo, and finally, my Aunt Janice in their final days - four people ultimately laid to rest over fifteen years of work and worry. I tell myself I did a satisfactory job - that my efforts beyond the simply necessary (of which there were many) were loved and appreciated, but I cannot help but allow guilt to occasionally grip me.

I have been provided countless blessings and opportunities in life, and I do reluctantly but honestly admit a level of irritation with the responsibilities of taking care of my relatives during the ends of their lives. Having a tiny family has its drawbacks - chiefly, there are few options for alternative or aid in taking care of elder family members. I futilely, and foolishly, asked, “why me?” As with other obligations that tasked me and revealed my selfishness, I accepted my responsibilities and tried my best to help those who needed help.

I know there was an option to choose a different course of action - as all life consists merely of on-going acts of choice. What do I do? Why? For whom? For me, the choices with my relatives were not overwhelmingly attractive, but they were clearly defined.

As a child, those same people - my mom, dad, and aunts - made their own choices to help me in my growth and understanding of life. I was indebted to them.

However, their choices to help me as a child and adult were, I know, founded wholly in love, and ultimately, my choices to take care of them were easy because love motivated and embraced me.

Sometimes life can seem confusing and staggering; personal joy and preference may take precedence and be nearly irresistible, but love, unadulterated in perspective and understanding, can provide tremendous clarity and comfort. I am grateful everyday for the love of family now gone but also, so much, for the strong and supportive love of friends and family here.

I am grateful.

Time passes so quickly. Hours become days. Days become weeks. Weeks become years.

It’s been too long to neglect my thoughts for this outlet, so I’m writing a quick post.

Death has made another recent round of visits to my family and friends, and the grief affects me more than I want to admit. I thought the past hardened me, but I suppose death - the loss of love - is never, ever easy to deal with.

Nearly fifteen years ago, my family encountered a time of great loss - my wife lost multiple cousins and, most devastatingly, her mom. I lost cousins, an uncle, and also my mom. All in all, we had ten close family members die within twelve months. My side of the family is small, and I have some earned credit as a “responsible party”, so I was usually saddled with the tasks of making arrangements, notifying, and consoling - not an easy job, I think, for just one relative, but I accepted the responsibilities with as much strength as I could find. Along with the emotional trauma, I had financial crises to confront. All I could do was have faith that life will only give you what you can handle and find my way out of the darkness in which I was placed.

After taking care of my dad for a couple years after my mom’s passing, my dad left this earth. Another time of sadness enveloped me, but I had more available support, so I was able to get through it a bit “easier”.

Between my dad’s death in 2013 and the death of one of my mom’s remaining two sisters, there was more adversity - enough to reserve comment today and MAYBE share in the future in its own post, but it is enough to say, I had to take on the role of caregiver with full physical and mindful commitment.

Within a few months in 2019, one aunt died and the other was hospitalized then placed in a rehabilitation facility and ultimately accepted a room in a skilled-nursing group home. COVID hit in 2020, and I found myself (her only visitor - I have a brother, but again, that is whole other story) visiting with her for nearly a year through the window she fortunately had.

My aunt, my last living tie to the generations before me, is now 74. She has been on dialysis for almost 25 years. She has lost the ability to walk and to feed herself, but her mind is sharp. My focus, for awhile, on this platform will be to share her thoughts and perspective from a different time. I’m looking forward to what we’ll find together.

Some meandering but maybe meaningful thoughts as background…

I grew up on the Gila and Salt River Indian reservations, and I can say with certainty that we were financially poor.

My father was born in Gdańsk, Nazi Germany the day before D-Day. While my grandfather was a prisoner of war in France (being a doctor, he was well-cared for), my grandmother and infant father traveled by foot across Germany to my great-grandparents’ home on the German-Swiss border.

After the war, my grandparents settled in Köln, and that was where my father lived (aside from apprenticeship time in Düsseldorf) until he turned 21, and he immigrated to North America. Not really speaking English well, but French well enough, my father moved to Montreal. After time, he made his way to Calgary and while there, made contact with my mother as a pen pal.

My mother was born in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father was Salt River Pima, and her mother was Gila River Pima. My mom grew up on the Salt River rez, but my grandfather wanted to make my grandmother happy, and they moved to Sacaton on the Gila River reservation when my mom was 14.

An engineer, my grandfather intended to build a new home for his family on their land in Sacaton, but he had a very untimely death at the age of 44 due to an aneurysm - likely a latent result of injuries suffered during World War II. My mom was 17, her sisters were 15 and 8, and they and their mother were left living in a “temporary” house without any regular income. My grandmother was an RN, so she found work at the state prison about 30 miles away in Florence. My mother, wanting to help, started working as a secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as soon as she graduated high school. It was there that, one day, the agency superintendent handed her a letter telling her she could respond if she wanted. Some guy was looking for pen pals.

In 1968, my parents were married - a German immigrant and a Native American. They had different backgrounds, but they embraced a common future. Of all their commonalities, the one that likely made the greatest impression on me was the drive to move beyond where one was.

Like I said, we were poor, so, in reality, my brother, my parents, and I spent the greatest part of our time in Sacaton. On occasion, we would travel to Casa Grande, Coolidge, or Chandler for needed items or services, and a few times a year, we would travel to Phoenix. It was an amazing experience for me to be in Phoenix with all the varied sights and sounds. It seemed so impressive to me as a city then. Though now I can recognize what a little burg Phoenix really was in the 1970’s, it let me feel some of the possible greater excitement and energy of humanity.

With just the right circumstances of desire and ability, my parents would take my brother and me to other parts of the state. My great-uncle, who was over 100 years old, lived with his wife (herself in her 90’s) in Casa Blanca, so we would go there often. They spoke only Pima and though they lived in a newer built house, they still maintained their old “ki” (a shallow pit house covered with a dome of arrow-weed) and “vatho” (a ramada with mesquite trunk posts and an arrow-weed roof). If we spent the night, only my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Kate slept in the house; the rest of us slept under the vatho - I truly loved that. Also, although there was a bathroom with modern plumbing in the house, it was reserved for the elders, so us younger folk had to use the outhouse - that wasn’t as fun, especially when rattlesnakes would wander near or INTO the facilities.

My great-grandfather lived in Sells, Arizona which was a few hours away near the Mexican border on the Tohono-O’odham reservation, and we made sure to visit him for a few weeks at a time especially during the summer. He was actually my grandmother’s maternal uncle but became her adoptive father after she was orphaned at the age of nine. He also only spoke O’odham (though he could speak English and Spanish, he chose not to), but it was the Tohono O’odham dialect, and that was what my grandmother adapted to speaking and what my mother, aunts, and my brother and I heard and learned as we all grew up.

Southern Arizona was and is hot, and my dad never really acclimated to it (hell, I was born here and never really acclimated to it), so once a year, if we were lucky, my parents would figure out a way to travel north to Flagstaff and, if we were really lucky, the Grand Canyon. Those were the most memorable times for me - letting me witness an environment so, so different from what I was used to.

Eventually, when it came time to pick a college, I wanted to go to an exceptional school but preferably also some place cool with rain and running water rather than the dryness and heat I knew so well. Recruited by Dartmouth and provided a trip there by the college when I was a junior in high school, I eagerly applied my senior year and happily matriculated after being accepted.

We had so many different cars growing up, it was funny, but my last two years in high school, we were, for the most part, carless. With my share of the tribe’s water settlement that I received when I turned 18, I bought an old van my parents were trying to “buy” from a private dealer who took advantage of numerous people on the reservation with Godforsaken terms. For their own fun, and to help me move my belongings to New Hampshire from Arizona, my parents offered to drive me the three thousand miles to Dartmouth from Salt River.

So, in late August of 1989, my explorer parents and I drove across the country. It turned out to be the first of many for me. By 1995, I personally drove across the nation almost thirty times. My trip with my parents, as well as my other trips with friends (some who would become very much like family), will be the likely frequent subject of these posts.

I still love the road, but those old trips were special. No responsibilities except schoolwork, no cell phones, the best company, plenty of resources and good, reliable vehicles - those were the ingredients for magic.

With luck, maybe a little of those captivating moments from the past can be distilled into a drop or two of energy and emotion today.

Eleven years ago, on January 15, 2010, my mom passed.

Typically, I silence my phone when I go to sleep. Occasionally I’ll turn it to “Do Not Disturb” (I really should do that more often because emergency calls will ring on the second attempt to reach me.). Eleven years ago, however I had an inkling that something may happen overnight, so I left my ringer on. Before sunrise, I received a frantic call from my dad telling me my mom wasn’t breathing and that he’d called 911. Before I even left my front door, I knew she was gone from this world.

Two years after my mom, my dad passed on June 30, 2013. He was in a rehab facility at the time, and no one was with him when he physically died, but I take solace in the fact that I told him, “I love you” as my last words to him a few hours before.

Not long after my dad died, my aunts - my mother’s sisters - moved into my parents house. One had only one leg and needed a wheelchair to get anywhere beyond her recliner/bed (because she neglected to do her physical therapy with her prosthetic). My other aunt was in nominally better shape but had been on dialysis for fourteen years by that point, and her physical abilities were rapidly declining. From 2013 to 2019, I spent more and more of my time taking care of my aunts. I wished for help. I asked for help. I begged for help from everyone I could think of, but everyone was either too busy or simply incapable of helping. I broke an ankle at one point and occasionally had to use a cane because of my strained back. On June 5, 2019, one of my two aunts passed away. It was returning from her grave a couple days ago when I took the included photo of the San Tan Mountains as seen from the south - a view I know oh-so-well as I spent many of my childhood years living on the very northern edge of Sacaton, Arizona where this was the view from the back door and yard.

Life is not death though. Death may come now and again to change our lives, but it only accents growth and places it in comfortable context. It is something new that happens to us - grievous as it may sometimes be. Five years ago, on January 14, 2016, something else new happened to me. That was the day we, Rachel and I, legally completed our adoption of Marcus. I have always considered my life blessed, but he has been one of my greatest blessings.

It is primarily for Marcus that I record these memories. He may or may not be interested, but I leave them for him first.

It’s been a few weeks since I set up this Substack. I feel it’s necessary to expand on that most generic introduction originally published.

My name is Hans-Dieter Stefan Klose. My father was born in Gdańsk, Poland (Nazi Germany at the time of his birth in 1944) and raised in Koln, Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1968. My mother is Akimel O’odham (Pima) from the Salt River reservation in southern Arizona. I am an enrolled member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, but I have relatives and have lived on the Gila River Indian Community and Tohono O’odham Nation at different times in my life as well.

My family has gotten smaller (remarkable, really, in modern Native American communities), and my brother has no children, so we are near the end of the line for our bit of the family string. I decided to publish to this site for a couple reasons. First and foremost, I want to record pieces of my family’s history. It may be of simple interest to some, but, emerging from my most personal objectives, it will also provide some record for my son of who we are and where he came from. The second reason I decided to publish some of my thoughts is simply to share ideas I may have that would take more time than the typical Facebook or Instagram post would likely be anticipated to take to read.

Chief among my varied thoughts will be those on land in Native America. The O’odham have existed as a unique linguistic group for at least two thousand years. If one assumes there was linguistic and genetic “crossover” with the Huhugam (who are considered an independent group of people in our own creation stories), then our people have been on this part of the planet for more than four millennia. The twentieth century saw the solidification of reservation systems and the piecemeal allotment of lands to individual Indians. As we make our way further into the twenty-first century and further from the “Reservation Era” (as I am calling it), I believe there is an ongoing opportunity for Native Americans to reclaim their histories and identities, and one of the most meaningful ways they can exercise their authority is to move past the literal confines of federally managed reservations and government imposed and supported philosophies and into the realm of truly sovereign jurisdictions.

The early twentieth century saw the nadir of populations for our peoples. There is a massive boom of tribal populations going on right now, yet the world is vastly different than it was one hundred years ago (and certainly more than it was one thousand years ago) and it extends its cultural influence deep into every society of the world, threatening to dilute each into merely a version of the dominant. We need to seize every chance we have to remember the past - the stories, the language, the customs - and to formulate a genuinely meaningful future of identity and place for our peoples and their descendants. Those chances are renewed with every new day.