Greg Peters

I'm not a psychologist, but I think grief is an emotion meant to be shared. Sharing stories and remembering loved ones can lift us up. It is love’s way of evening the score. For there can be love without grief, but not the other way around. Grief is a sludge byproduct of love when it's taken away. 

My mom was the physical disciplinarian in our household while growing up. She doled out consequences to actions. Some made parental sense to me. A dirty swearing tongue produced soap in the mouth to "clean it." Yellow Dial was the soap brand of choice. Rear-end spankings with plastic spoons were also a popular consequence. The plastic spoons swatting the Peters brothers’ rear ends grew in length and thickness like our JC Penny jeans through the elementary years. I thought I had it figured out. My mom's spankings just didn't hurt. It was like Brer Rabbit tricking the fox into throwing him into the thorny briar patch. I acted like they hurt and it prolonged the easy punishment. My younger brother, Jeff, however, ruined it. After a plastic spoon broke over his rear-end one day, he turned around, sneered his upper lip, squinted his eyes, and defiantly said to our mom, "That didn't hurt."

From that point forward, we had room jail sentences and the kid crimes were gaveled with numbers, as in how many hours or days we couldn't go outside. To me, room banishment was awful punishment, but it wasn’t the worst kind of consequence.              

It was the winter of 1989. I had recently received my driver's license in 10th grade. My mom was a teacher and she was out of town for a weekend at a conference. I was hanging out with two seniors on the boys' basketball team and stayed out until 2:30 a.m. I figured my dad would be sleeping and I could sneak in, undetected. Our house was on a corner lot and when I took the left-hand turn into the cul-de-sac, I could see my dad sitting in a lawn chair in the driveway.

As I cranked the key towards me turning off the ignition, I could see the look of disappointment and worry in his eyes underneath the spotlight he had installed for me to practice shooting baskets after the sun set. My dad shook his head, looked me right in the eye, and said, "Greg, you gotta do better than this."

There were no cell phones or Life 360 in 1989. My dad had been sitting in the lawn chair for at least two hours. The look in his eye and letting him down was, without question, the worst punishment I could have received.

Waiting for a loved one to return home had a different meaning for my dad. Bill Peters, my dad's dad, was a farmer in Lakefield, Minn., about 160 miles southwest of the Twin Cities. He was attending a farmer's union meeting in Minneapolis. Rumor has it, then-Minnesota state senator Hubert Humphrey was in attendance at the meeting. My dad's dad had a heart attack during the meeting and passed away on March 22, 1956. Bill Peters never came home. My dad was six years old. He had three sisters and a brother, all under the age of 8.

The neighbors pitched in and they planted and harvested the crop for my dad's mom, Clara, that year. Then, the farm was sold and they moved to town.  

Bill Peters had 19 siblings and one of them, Albert, lived about a mile away. In 1959, Albert had a TV set and my dad walked over to his Uncle Albert's house and watch a movie called "All Mine to Give."

It was a movie based on a true story about the Eunson family in Eureka, Wis. Robert and Mamie Eunson were Scottish immigrants who moved across the Atlantic Ocean to the small logging town of Eureka in 1856. Robert and Mamie had six children but when the oldest, Robbie, was 12, his father contracted diphtheria and died. His mom, Mamie, was a seamstress for a while, but, overworked and tired, she became stricken with typhoid and passed away. Robbie is left in charge. On Christmas day, Robbie and his brother Jimmy deliver each sibling to a different neighbor's house, as he assumes correctly no one could say “no” on Christmas. After Robbie drops his brother Jimmy off at the last neighbor's house, he puts his head down and goes off to work at a logging camp.

After watching the movie “All Mine to Give,” my 9-year-old dad would look out the window after school wondering if his mom, Clara, would come home from work each day. As the oldest son, he deduced, it would be his job to figure out what neighbors he would pick for his brother and sisters.  

His Grandma Wiese, my great-grandmother, would speak broken German-English and reassure my dad if you remember a loved one who passed away and say their name, they'll be an angel for the day and help someone.

My dad told me this story after I told him about a friend of mine, Jim Grothaus, who died unexpectedly last week. Jim lived in Hudson. His daughter, Olivia, and my daughter, Ella, play basketball together at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Jim and his wife, Amy, had car-pooled with us to games and we had just spent a fun weekend in Maine watching the Gusties make it to the Elite 8 in the NCAA tournament. Jim was the kind of guy who would tell R-rated jokes and if you laughed at them, it was his way of adding cool points to his friendship with you. I really only knew Jim for about one year and I feel like I was cheated out of 1,000 good jokes and even more laughs in the future. It's pretty easy to tell when you "click" with someone right away. I clicked with Jim. I thought my cool points with him would make the friendship hall of fame in the years to come.  

The second to the last thing I remember about Jim was when my wife, Jenna, and I were dropping off our rental car at the Portland, Maine airport. The Hertz guy was inspecting it for dents.

Amy and Jim were returning their rental car as well and jokingly hollered out the window as they drove by, "There's a dent on the left side, don't let those two get away with it!"

The Hertz guy laughed and so did we.

As we made our way through airport security, I told Jim and Amy's son, Oscar, a senior at Hudson High School, he won the "brother of the year award" for flying to Maine to watch his sister. Oscar smiled and then I said, "See you all back in Wisconsin."

Their flight was cancelled, ours wasn’t, and Jim died in a hotel in New York City later that night.  

My dad, still adhering to the advice Grandma Wiese gave him when he was 9 years old, told me I should write about it because more people would say Jim's name and he could be an angel that many more days to help Olivia, Oscar, and Amy.

Even though I never knew my grandfather, knowing my dad and my aunts and uncles, my guess is Bill Peters is earning quite a few cool points listening to Jim’s jokes.

There is much grief for Jim Grothaus but that's because there was so much love for him.