My oma survived unimaginable tragedy. She taught me ‘When the forest is too big, focus on the trees’

My oma was not a woman prone to emotional outbursts. Good news. Bad news. It was all handled the same.

A swig of brandy from a water glass (I never saw her pour it, it just seem to appear as if she had willed it into existence) and a cigarette (Kent, always Kent). With the brandy in one hand, her cigarette in the other, my oma received all news. The fall of the USSR. The death of loved ones. Invitations to hang out with her Lithuanian ladies. Leaks in the roof and her grandchildren’s school results.

She was never angry in English. That was the language for her grandchildren. But she would be furious in Lithuanian, the tongue she shared with my father. Incandescent with rage in Russian. Pragmatic in German. Whimsical in Italian. But her face never changed. Only her cadence. “Bah,” she would declare, with a swish of her hand which held her cigarette. Oma could make that cigarette say anything.

But she never held a grudge and always seemed to take everything in her stride. Her stride had to take in a lot: the death of children, the loss of her country. Displaced peoples’ camps and decades without her family. At least three broken marriages, including one man she’d loved more than the rest combined. Prejudice and racism and abuse.

Oma had to rebuild her life time and time and time again – as a child, as a daughter and sister, as a young woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a businesswoman, an Australian and then as an oma. She lost her name, her position, her path. And yet, after a sip of brandy, an inhale from her cigarette, she’d pull her shoulders back and move forward.

I asked her once, how she did it. Life to me always seemed so much all of the time. I was overwhelmed by its vastness, by the sheer enormity of it all.

“Child,” she said, in between cigarette drags, as we were always child when advice was about to be rolled out, “when the forest is too big, you just focus on the trees. Your only job is to get to the next tree. And when you’re there, you keep going to the tree after that. That’s how you get through the forest. One tree at a time.”

And that is how she moved through life. You did one thing and then you did the next. Sometimes, that meant just focussing on the next five minutes. Get through that, and then you could think about getting through the five minutes after that. Oma moved through unimaginable tragedy, overwhelming grief, anger, rage and loss after loss one tree at a time.

So when things seem too much, all of the time, I just focus on that next tree. That next moment, that next beat. Before I know it, I’m through to the next tree, the next moment, the next beat. I do one thing, and then I do the next. I’ve moved through countless forests, tree by tree.

And when even the path between trees seems too much, a sip of brandy never hurts either.