A Tribute to a Great (in More Ways Than One) Aunt

Ingrid Alice Hovick died on the same day the Church, on its liturgical calendar, commemorates Mary, Mother of Our Lord. In no way am I trying to compare Ingrid to the unrivaled greatness of Mary, a revered saint who has gone down in Christian history as having a central role in Jesus’ life and a towering figure in the Church. But if earthly families were able to bestow sainthood on certain members, Ingrid would deserve recognition like Mary as a towering figure in the Hovick family. Both were women with humble roots who got caught up in extraordinary circumstances in special places during exhilarating times. Today, however, as one of God’s children, Ingrid has gone home and joins Mary and all the saints in heaven. She became a saint herself and joins that great cloud of witnesses gathered at the river that flows by the throne of God.

I am a person who likes rituals and acknowledging occasions with appropriate actions and words (such as the commemoration on the liturgical calendar of Mary). So when I learned of Ingrid’s impending death, I started thinking of what way I might have to acknowledge her passing while here in Washington, D.C., away from the rest of the Hovicks who would probably be going through some ritual together in order to mark her passing.

This city, the nation’s capital, is my new home, a place my family and I chose to relocate to in the past few months. Although I have claimed it as my home now and have started to put down roots by buying a house and car and starting a job here, I have and always will think of this city as Ingrid’s city. I am here mostly because of Ingrid. Because this, to me, is her city, it should not be difficult for me to find something here – somewhere in the city – to do to remember and memorialize her. The trouble is, Ingrid spent most of her life in this city, and her presence here is so pervasive. I tell people that I chose to come to Washington, D.C., to live because I spent many of my growing-up years visiting Ingrid, my great aunt, flying across the country from Seattle for several days, attending a couple of presidential inaugurations, or taking the train down from Boston for Thanksgiving or other breaks in college. I came to love the city – its monuments, the atmosphere, its prominence, the politics, the importance of its government functions – on these visits. And I had an aunt I could stay with and who would dote on me.

Even after being in Washington, D.C., for a few months, I still don’t feel like a resident. I still feel like a visitor. And I still feel strange being here, because it was only and always a place I would visit temporarily and a place to go to visit Ingrid. Every time I move around the city, I see a building, monument, museum or landmark, and I say to Sarah, “Ingrid got us in there once,” or, “Ingrid managed to get tickets for us to take a tour there.” So my trouble in finding a ritual – a single thing I can do here in her city – to remember her by on her death is that there are too many possibilities. There is not one place in this city that I associate with Ingrid or one place that I know of that was her favorite. This entire city was hers. She knew it well, and when I visited her, I came to know it as well and love it like her. So I am still thinking of an action to take as a ritual, but at least I can start with my thanks to Ingrid for helping me get to know and love this city, and thanks for getting me here today, where I am now a resident. I am here because of you, Ingrid.

I have many memories of Ingrid, nearly all from my visits to her in Washington, D.C. I cannot and will not attempt to write down all of them. To me, the sweetness and beauty of some memories is that they are best when they stay inside your mind, and something happens to them – they are changed somewhat – when they are written down. I will certainly cherish all the memories I have of her. I came to Washington, D.C., once on my own for a week or so when I was a sophomore in high school to attend the inauguration of George H.W. Bush, and she got tickets for me and others and took us (Lynn, Andy, and one of Andy’s friends) to many of the inaugural events. That was truly a thrill being in the city for an event like that. Four years later, I came down to D.C. from Boston as a sophomore in college for Bill Clinton’s inauguration, and that time it was just the two of us trotting around town for the events. These were special times. Of course I loved the attention and doting that I got. At other times, I struggled to relate to her – me as a teenager or 20-something and her as an elderly woman. There was a big generational gap. She was my grandfather’s sister, and of course I believed that my grandfather and his generation were horribly out of date and did not understand me as a young person. One memory I have of this is coming back to her apartment after a long day of site seeing on one visit during my college years. She offered to stop at a pizza restaurant a few doors down from her place. I was a bit surprised that she was willing to do this, but I was happy to have a more typical, college-type, informal meal after the many formal meals she had made me on that visit (which, as it turned out, were often Stouffer’s frozen meals). I gladly ordered two slices of pizza to go and expected that we would just take them up to her apartment and I would eat them with a can of Coke and she would eat something more traditional, more old-lady-like. Well, as it turned out, she nicely placed one slice of pizza each on two china plates and poured us each a tall glass of milk, and we ate the pizza with a knife and fork at her dining room table as a formal meal. Again, she reminded me so much of my grandparents.

Despite some instances like this, I know she loved treating me to meals and events and paying for tickets. We had many full days of site seeing on my visits, and some would end with concerts in the evening at the Kennedy Center or a museum or plays at Ford’s Theater. This was her way of showing her love to me. She had done this to my parents’ generation, with her nieces and nephews on their visits to D.C. and when some of them lived here. I know she adored all of her nieces and nephews and me, her great-nephew.

Four generations of Hovicks, October 2007

Ingrid’s death is also the passing of a generation. Never have I known a Hovick to live so long. She was healthy, active and energetic late into her life, and all Hovicks who knew her and spent time with her were fortunate to have a family member like her. Even from the time I was young, she was always old to me. On one of my first visits to Washington, D.C., she took my family and me to the National Air and Space Museum, and she pointed out a short, cigar-shaped propeller plane in a shiny, polished aluminum hanging from the ceiling. “That’s the same model of plane that I flew out here on from Minnesota.” I’ll never forget that. I remember thinking – and still do – “Man, lady, you must be really old if planes you flew on are already in a museum!” She was the institutional memory of the Hovicks. But in a way, having lived so far from most of the Hovicks for decades, much of Ingrid’s memory bank was built from other places and things away from where the Hovicks lived and were centered. In a way, it was exotic to have a relative from the extended family living in a far-away place, perhaps not a strange or exotic, per se, place, but one that was exciting and only for select few who could really handle the excitement and demands of an important, high-profile city like D.C. She was a novelty, a strange connection we had to a big, important city. She obviously had had an independent streak to move at a young age from rural Minnesota to a city that was building itself up during World War II. And so all that she lived through in Washington, D.C., from the administration of FDR to that of George W. Bush, she was an institution, a long-surviving memory bank and a connection to our past.

Ingrid Hovick, born early in the 1900s, and Alexandria Padre, born 90 years later in another millennium (photo from October 2007, when Lexi was 2 months old)

Ingrid was the lone surviving member of my grandparents’ generation. She outlived my grandparents by many years, and in a way was a bit of an anomaly in this regard. But I consider myself fortunate to live in a family that had four generations in it at one point. I’m most pleased that Ingrid, someone I was close to, someone whom I knew enjoyed watching me grow up, lived long enough to see me have a child and to meet Lexi. The second thing I’m most pleased about is that she lived long enough to see me and know that I had finally fulfilled a long-standing dream to move to Washington, D.C., to live and work here. I say that I’ve had this dream since my last year of college, when I took a job with a fixed term in Chicago before graduation and had planned to return somewhere to the East Coast after that year or so. After eight years in Chicago, followed by four years in Geneva and a year and a half in Nairobi, I was finally in a position to choose where in the U.S. I could live and could choose Washington, D.C. But I could say my dream went back further than college – or was planted well before that – because my dream started to develop on those trips out east when I would come here to stay with her and see the great monuments of the city and country. So, with Ingrid’s passing is the end of that oldest generation in my family, and all of us move up a rung on the ladder, and time marches on.

In this thinking about death and lives passing, I have a different perspective now as a father. I have a young girl to raise and care for. At one point in her life, Ingrid was a little girl, and she had parents who cared for her and wondered, as I do, what would become of her life. Certainly her parents or none of her peers as children could have imagined the changes she would live through or witness – World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, JFK’s assassination, the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, the Jet Age, the dawn of the Information Age and being able to speak to my daughter, a country and three generations away, on a webcam. Certainly Ingrid, as a single woman with no family obligations, could take advantage of a lot that was going on in the world and travel and see many places. The world has opened up for my generation, and I have been able to travel as much, if not more, as Ingrid did. And certainly my daughter will find a more open – and smaller – world than Ingrid or I did. But what a connection that was between Ingrid and Lexi, born 90 years apart – how Ingrid’s life reached back to the beginning years of the 1900s, and how Lexi’s life began on a different continent (Europe, where the Hovicks originated just a generation before Ingrid’s) nearly a century later in a different millennium.

I know Ingrid could not live forever – no one can. But it almost seemed like she would. I knew her for a long time, and she knew me for all of my 36 ½ years. I will miss her, of course. I was having a lot of fun telling her about “her” city after I had moved here and started discovering new and fun places. And I know she was having a lot of fun reading my regular e-mail updates. She had told me she was even a little jealous that I was living here and she wasn’t.

So, I offer these words as a tribute to Ingrid, and perhaps this is the ritual I was looking for. I am a writer at heart, and I wrote down these words as a way to remember her. Writing is often a ritual for me, a personal expression, so this can be one ritual I do in Ingrid’s memory. One way that people often memorialize someone who has died is by giving a gift to a charity they liked or supported themselves. I thought about causes that Ingrid liked, and the one she was most staunchly a supporter of was the Republican Party. Another part of Ingrid’s personality was her very conservative views. But in all those years of visiting Ingrid in D.C. and developing for myself a taste for national politics and presidential campaigns, I became a staunch Democrat, the opposite of her. Ingrid knew this, but she didn’t share her political views with me very often. One thing I could probably not do, however, is to give a monetary gift to the Republican Party! As much as Ingrid might be delighted in knowing that I did this, I would have to be just as staunch a supporter of my own party as she was of hers.

One last note about Ingrid: Everybody knew her as being hard of hearing or being deaf all together. Certainly she was a real communicator, however. She may have missed out on much of the world and its sounds, but she kept her mind sharp and engaged by reading voraciously, keeping up on current events and foreign affairs, and writing letters and keeping in touch with friends and family around the world. She may have wished she could hear again in her last decades of life, but in a way, her hearing impairment was part of her personality. It was very much a part of who she was. But today, the day after her death, I am pleased to know that her body is restored. She is no longer old and frail, and I know that she has her hearing back. As she entered heaven, I know she heard the voice of Jesus say, loudly and clearly, “Welcome home, Ingrid Alice.”

Stephen Padre
Washington, D.C.
August 16, 2009