In Memory of Andra Timm née Grinvalds

Andra’s Death

My sister Andra died suddenly at the age of 69 on 5 January 2025. By chance, I had visited her the day before. I was in the U.S. visiting for the holidays. On the last day of my visit, I was in a hurry to meet a friend when my sister Susan texted and said, “You should visit your sister.” She was right. I had only seen Andra at our Christmas party, but she wasn’t herself. We didn’t have a chance to have a real talk, and I wanted to spend more time with her before I went back to Latvia.

I drove 20 minutes to her Waterloo Duplex to surprise her, hoping she would be home. She hadn’t been returning my Facebook messages as regularly lately, so I wasn’t sure if she had gotten my message.

When I arrived, I knocked on the door, and her son, Shane, opened it up and was happy to see me. I hadn’t seen him for years, so we hugged, and Andra was sitting on her couch a bit surprised, but happy that I was there. She said her knees hurt so bad that she couldn’t walk much. She was always in some kind of pain.

We chatted for awhile, and I drove Shane to the store to pick up some supplies. When we got back, the conversation got deep into conspiracies about what was real and what wasn’t. Shane and I blew her mind by pointing out the mathematical fact that any time you shuffle 52 cards, the chances of them being in the same order is more than the number of atoms in the universe. No two decks have ever been the same. This fact seemed to be spreading over a variety of social media sources because it had come up in other discussions as well. Andra couldn’t believe it.

That was the last conversation I had with her. I said goodbye, and left. She seemed in good spirits other than her knee pain. Shane even made her a little cane to help her get up off the couch.

I flew home to Latvia the next day. The flight took over 20 hours, and it was that weird time loss where I left on a Saturday and got home on Sunday. On Sunday evening, my sister Susan called, and she never calls. No one ever calls anymore, do they? So I called her back, and she said, “Your sister Andra is dead.” I was in shock, she was in shock. We were all a bit shocked. She was only 69, and I had just seen her the day before. The suddenness of it all combined with the shift in time and space from Nebraska to Latvia made everything seem even less real. But there it was; and in my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, “And then there were five.”

Andra’s Life

I am the youngest of 7 siblings. My oldest brother Arnold died when I was 18. I wrote a blog about him recently. Now with Andra gone, Paul is the oldest followed by Norman, Susan, Alan and me. Growing old is hard.

Andra grew up mostly in Gothenburg, Nebraska where our father was a pastor. I recently found a video of my father talking about the move from Gothenburg to Yutan when Andra was a teenager. Dad said that the move really hurt Andra because she had to say goodbye to all of her friends.

Andra and I had a complicated relationship. She was 16 and 1/2 years older than me, and she became a mother six months after I was born. Her son Chris and I grew up together more like brothers than uncle and nephew. We went to the same school, and everyone thought we were cousins because having an uncle in the same class was just too strange. She and Chris lived with us for a few years until she moved out and tried to live in Fremont on her own. She was going to Midland College. I have vague memories of her making games for her elementary education courses and bringing them home for Chris and I to play.

Soon, she was pregnant again with Shane who was born 4 years later. So here she was, unmarried, just finishing college with two kids, neither of whom had fathers in the picture. From 1976 to 1981, it seemed that we were one big family living in our house in Yutan with Shane and Chris always being around. For some reason, I always had this feeling that Andra hated me, but I don’t know why. I did thank her recently for making life more fun when I was young. I realize that because Chris and I were the same age, I was automatically included in lots of outings, parties and other events. Without Andra, I wouldn’t have photos from when Chris and I were babies, and I wouldn’t have gone on adventures in her dangerously unstable white Impala.

Then, in 1981, she got married to Lee Timm, and they moved out taking Shane and Chris with them. They had one more baby named Jamie.

At the time, Andra had been working at Rich’s bar in Yutan before she finally got a job teaching at the elementary school. For awhile, life seemed pretty normal. She and Lee were together raising the kids, working and living as a family. But for Andra, life was never simple.

Shane got in a car accident that almost killed him when a friend crashed and Shane suffered a brain injury. Her daughter Jamie got pregnant shortly after high school, and she and Andra raised Nicholas together. Somewhere along the way, she and Lee went bankrupt and lost the house. They ended up moving to Valley in this miserable little house with a swastika above the porch. I always thought that was probably a bad sign.

It was somewhere during this time of turmoil and strife that the two of us became closer. Me with my divorces. The death of our mother in 2012. I guess we were the two black sheep drawn together by unusual circumstances.

In 2014, after suffering a stroke, her husband Lee died in the basement of that house. Andra called me to come help her. From that time on, I was driving her to family events and visiting her as often as I could. Dad had moved in with me, later Chris would move in with me. For a few years, that was my world.

I did my best to get her out of the house. We went to the Stir Concert Cove to see a few concerts together, and I would pick her up to take her to the Latvian church in Lincoln as well as other family gatherings.

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Keeping in Touch

When I moved to Latvia in 2017, Andra and I kept in touch via Facebook messenger. Of all my siblings, she was the one who contacted me most regularly. The conversations were always a bit weird, but inevitably emotional and interesting. Somewhere along the way, we had forged a deep mutual understanding of the world. She subscribed to lots of our brother Norm’s philosophies, and we often talked about living in or out of the Matrix. Andra always felt like she was playing a role in the world, never really fitting into the normal mold that society would have her in. In this way, she was a lot like our mother.

One story I remember was that when she was little at the 100R country school in Gothenburg, the teachers made them go outside when it was bitterly cold out. To protest, she went outside and refused to wear a coat. The teachers ended up letting the kids stay inside because of her stubborness.

For 30 years she had the same haircut with a curly brown top. Then, she decided to go natural with her long grey hair draping down her shoulders. Suddenly she was old. Her ailments were many, and it always seemed like there was something wrong. When I saw her at Christmas, she had a chipped tooth from falling down. Despite all that, when she was in a good mood, she was one of the funniest people I have ever know.

Her insights and laughter were a gift to me and many other people who loved her, and she will be missed. In the end, I think she was just too tired to keep going. Life had worn her down, and she had been through it all.