Lake Como, Italy

A.M. Post: We are now in what surely has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth (photos to follow), and I have no idea if I will be able to get any work done. Maybe it will rain; perhaps I will become jaded. One can only hope.

P.M. Aahh: now I see how it works. One walks ones calves off, first climbing to the top of the hill, then going down to the village and climbing all the way back up. THEN one is so tired of walking and of beauty (for the day) that one can sit down at a desk and work. Perhaps this will work, after all.

Plus, the limitless supply of cappucino helps, too (especially after the obligatory --tough, I know--wine at lunch. Cocktails at 7:00, dinner at 7:30, apertifs after. Dear me, what a life.

(Sorry for the lack of an apostrophe in the above possessive "ones." The blog site is being temperamental again.)

Season of Dark, Season of Light

Season of Dark, Season of Light

It is getting colder and darker here in Sweden, and in Stockholm at night, the city is lit by fire. Small fires, in the form of candles, torches and 12-18 inch fire pits (we have no English vocabulary for them), but fire none the less. As soon as it gets dark, any small shop or any restaurant that is open has fire outside, in one form or another, to let people know. On sidewalks everywhere, there are lanterns with candles, open candles, or, for the larger tourist places, the larger fire pits or torches. In small restaurants, they turn off (or dim) the electric lights and simply light the place with candles, in chandeliers, on tables, on the stairs, on the counter, in wall sconces. In homes, too, according to our Swedish friends, it is time to light candles at night, all around one’s home. Since few apartments have curtains or shades, as one walks the streets, one’s way is lit by streetlights and lamplights from people’s windows, but it is also comforting to know that indoors, many people have their candles lit.

The most lovely form that this takes are the candles that are lit on sidewalks, in order to let one’s guests know, first, how to get to one’s apartment from the nearest subway stop, (so the spacing of candles every 15 feet or so along the sidewalk), second, that one has arrived at the correct building, and third, to follow the steps in the building until wherever one’s apartment is. I guess that since the king who decided to knock down all those wooden buildings all over Stockholm in the 1880s-1920s had them replaced with stone, people aren’t worried about fires destroying the city. Certainly for such a large city, one rarely hears sirens.

The other night a local social institution (Masons?) had a large party, and there were candles guiding the way from the T-stop above our street, down our street, around the corner, across the street (not actually ON the street, of course), and then up the 40-50 steps that lead from the sidewalk up to the little hilltop that the building is on. Each of those steps had a large lit candle smack in the center of the step, and it was breath-takingly lovely.

All of this helps me to understand something about the Swedish soul. Yul (Yule) is coming, and there are the beginnings of Yul decorations in shops: red-painted candelabras, the winter-gnomes (tomtar, the same name as for Santa, who IS one of these gnomes) who live in the north with the reindeer-herding Sami (usually these sometimes helpful, sometimes trouble-making house-gnomes live under the floor boards of nice people, but some live in the north, with the reindeer). In early December, Swedes will celebrate St. Lucia Day, when the family will be awakened by the daughter of the house, carrying a tray of food, and wearing a crown of LIT candles. If she has brothers, they may dress as star-boys and follow her with lit lanterns. Gamla Stan, the Old Town, will be lit with beauty. The shallow fountain-pools in parks will be filled with water to freeze for ice-skating. And Swedes will celebrate their Mid-Winter Festival of Light; not a religious Christmas, in this profoundly secular society, and not an orgy of consumerism, as in our supposedly religious society, but a festival both celebrating the winter, the cold and the dark (by late December, tnhere will be a scant 6 hours of light in Stockholm; it will be full dark by 3:00 pm here, and of course, even earlier north of here. Where the Sami live, it will be dark all day), and fighting it, with their light. Sweden, that nation of 8 million do-gooders, which took in half a million refugees from our war in Iraq, plus thousands of refugees from other wars in Africa, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, Kosovo, which gives a higher percentage of their national income to international relief than any other nation, and which generously shares its national wealth among its own people, IS a light among nations, the city on a hill that we Americans aspire to be, but can never be as long as our central defining identity is individualism, each person for themselves. I say, in this season of growing darkness and cold, let there be light.

Friday our first snow

The last blog was about beautiful fall weather in Stockholm. Well, that was Sunday; today is Friday. Still beautiful, but the seasons are moving fast! The really cold weather moved in after the mid-week rain, and the puddles have a skin of ice on them. It's 9:00 am, and this is what our street looks like. Shiver. Our friend, Dustin, just arrived from Atlanta, and the first thing he said when we started walking to dinner last night was, "I have to buy a hat." Don replied, "I have to WEAR my hat." Being the female in the group, I had my hat on.

Sunday in Autumn, Stockholm

Donald on an enormous tree "stump" outside the American Embassy.

This past Sunday we wanted to go to the one large museum we haven’t gone to yet (well, actually, there are a number of large museums we haven’t gone to yet in Stockholm, but this was one we really, really wanted to go to): the Nordisk (Norse) Museum, out on Djurgarden. The Nordisk Museum is basically 5 floors of Scandinavian history and culture, and is much too large to actually do in any real way, but we wanted to see some of it, at least. However, there was a Chocolate Festival happening at the museum, and the line to get in was HOURS long. So we instead took a couple-of-hours walk around Djurgarten and into the large park across the water, joining the literally thousands of Stockholmers out enjoying the cold, dry, sunny weather. The water was sparkly, the many embassies located in the park were gorgeous (and often unidentifiable), (THIS IS THE AMERICAN EMBASSY), the walk was long and exhausting and wonderful. So once again we ended the day completely whipped, as if we had been out all day in winter.

Stockholm in the fall is beautiful. It may usually be beautiful in summer, too, but our summer was so rainy that it was hard to really enjoy it fully. The weather turned gorgeous while we were in Eastern Europe, with a polar front descending on Scandinavia and turning the weather cold and dry. It is raining today, but the sun and cold weather (highs in the 30s to about 40 F) return tomorrow or the day after. I think this is my favorite city: clean and open, full of water and sky and air and beautiful architecture (yes, there is also modern “functional” architecture, but I tend to avoid those streets so I don’t have to see those buildings) and parks and cafes. Most cities I have been to are noisy, dirty, and crowded feeling. I imagine that maybe Seattle is like this? Brisbane is, but on a much smaller scale. New York,Chicago, Paris, San Francisco, Prague, Krakow, Florence, London, Dublin, Atlanta, ....: none of them have the same sort of open-air feel that Stockholm does, at the same time that it offers everything a city needs to. I have heard that the Australian cities in general share this outdoorsy feel. I'd be happy to find out for myself!

This is actually why I chose to NOT go to Venice or Rome for our one free vacation week in late November: after reading online about those cities, for all their glories, I am just not up for a week of dirty, loud, crowded, smelly city. Some other time.

Vaxholm Island

We are down to the end of our stay in Sweden. We have one more weekend left here, before we leave for Italy, and 2 of our friends (Dustin and Irene) are coming to visit, separately but at the same time, for a few days over that last weekend (Dustin lives in Atlanta, and is coming to work with Don for a few days, and Irene is working this fall in Rostock in Germany). This past weekend, we decided to do something we had not had the chance to do before: we took a 50 minute boat ride out to the island of Vaxholm, which lies at the gateway from the Baltic Sea into the inner archipelago that Stockholm is a part of. Vaxholm has been lived on for over a thousand years, but was settled forcibly by the Vasa kings in the 1500s, in order to guard the inner archipelago. A fortress was built on a small islet just off the larger island, and was involved in wars in the 1600s and 1700s. That fort was updated in the 1800s, but was immediately obsolete, in terms of the art of warfare.

Today Vaxholm is a major tourist destination, and is accessible by road as well as by boat. It is a jumping-off point for the rest of the outer archipelago, and has a seriously cute village with artisans, cafes, inns, and gorgeous, typically Swedish vacation homes.

We walked for about 3 or so hours,

and also had lunch, before getting back on the boat back to Stockholm. The temperature was right above freezing all day, with a blue sky and dry air (which is what we have mostly been having for weather lately). There was actually a puddle that was frozen, in the shade, in midday!

Oddly, being there was more like being on a lake in Maine than at the coast; although it LOOKED like the coast, it did not smell like it. The water is not particularly salty, and so you don't get the sort of salt-air one expects at the coast.

Chinese Terracotta Army

Thursday, October 14, 2010 Yesterday Don and I both took off from work in the afternoon and went to the Museum of Eastern Art here in Stockholm. They opened an exhibit there a few weeks ago based on the Terracotta Army found in China, buried with the First Emperor of the Qin (Chin) Dynasty, the first leader who united what had been warring tribes, into the earliest version of China (the first few hundred years, B.C.). There were about 4000 larger-than-life terracotta statues, originally brightly painted, very life-like, who made up, together, a garrison of foot soldiers, archers, horse-mounted officers, and charioteers. Archeologists are still excavating all the grave goods in and near this burial mound. This Emperor’s rule only lasted 15 years before the tribal groups and aristocracy under him revolted under his demanding rule (conscription into a 600,000-man army, half a million more slaves working only to glorify him and his wife and concubines when they were dead, and of course the taxes and food requirements to fund his extravagant way of life and of death.

The next Dynasty, the Han, was then founded, and continued the practice of burying the emperors with full-size armies, models of palaces, complete palace households full of acrobats, musicians, servants, craftsmen, models of livestock (pigs, goats, oxen, dogs), and also thousands of skeletons of real slaves (their chains and bonds were still attached to their bones), who were, archeologists believe, murdered en masse after they had built their emperors’ grave mound and artifacts. All of this reflected their basic spiritual belief system, “as below, so above;” they believed that the afterlife would look exactly as it did here on earth, and so the Emperor needed a full palace retinue to continue his lifestyle, PLUS he needed a full army to defend him and his household from his enemies whom he had conquered. Why the real live servants were killed they have no clue. Interestingly, these models of palaces, along with their full terracotta armies and households, each had literally hundreds of thousands of artisans involved in their manufacture and upkeep. The above-ground temples that were erected to actually guard the below-ground complexes, also involved real human communities of hundreds of thousands. These temple complexes were larger in population than the towns nearby that did NOT have burials beneath them.

The Qin and Han emperors’ burial mounds (they are HUGE, like large real hills) and nearby burials of real and fake humans, etc, have only been partially excavated (maybe 10% excavated). So there are many more artifacts and army and other figures to be found. For now, one major difference between the two empires is that although the Han Dynasty’s burial mounds contain many thousands more figures, those figures are much smaller (maybe 2 feet tall humans) than those of the Qin Dynasty.

The exhibit here in Stockholm contains, of course, a very small selection of the artifacts and human figures (dozens of the smaller Han models of humans, maybe 8 or so of the larger-than-life Qin soldiers). Also in the exhibit were beautiful objects from the model palaces, architectural bits and pieces from them, and some jade spiritual items, including these gorgeous disks with openings in the center. These jade discs began to be used in burials and in religious rituals in China during the Neolithic era, meaning a few thousand years B.C., and were passed down through families for hundreds and possibly thousands of years. Here is the most beautiful one they have ever found, which was from the Han dynasty burials. IN front of the disc (which has a jade cup alongside it) are numerous bronze and clay lamps (including a great ram-shaped lamp, in front of the disk, and a number of incense burners. The larger bits are architectural details.

Here is the entrance to the cave that the Chinese Terracotta Army Exhibit was displayed in, underneath the Museum of Eastern Art in Stockholm. The caves were built for the Swedish Naval Command during World War II; this is the first time they have been used for an exhibit. The building above is the church for the Navy. The church, caves, and museum are on the island of Skeppsholmen, which is home to many, many old, beautiful boats, too.

Eating Out in Stockholm

Sunday, October 10, 2010. I thought I would share with you some of the more interesting places we have RECENTLY eaten in Stockholm (we’ve eaten in interesting and/or good places before, but it’s too late to write about them now!). While out on Gamla Stan (the medieval Old Town) recently we ate in a very cool restaurant that was first a monastery and then a prison; the prison used the cells that the monks had slept in and turned them into prison cells. The space dates from the 1300s, and the restaurant had restored some of the cells and also the refectory, and so we ate in a small cell from 700 years ago. They had done a very good job; it was quite evocative.Here is the entrance to the restaurant; the lower (smaller)sign says, "DO you dare to come into our 700 year old prison?" The larger sign is saying Welcome into their medieval prison, with 6 old prison rooms. Cute. This, of course, is Donald; he is sitting in our little "cell," where we had cappucino and a homemade waffle with jam. The cell was about 4.5 feet by 3.5 feet.
And here is the large, heavy iron entrance door to the basement, which basically says that it is from the 1300s, and was a prison until the 1700s. It mentions two kings, including Gustaf III, who would have been a Vasa king.

We also ate recently in a couple of the outdoor cafes (I think I’ve already mentioned how these cafes have blankets for your chair, and many of them also have outdoor heaters, so people can continue to enjoy the outdoors as long as possible. It has gotten quite chilly, and would not be possible to sit comfortably outside to eat without these blankets) that are on Stortorget. Stor=Stockholm, and Stortorget is the old, original Town Square from the earliest town, dating from the late 1200s/early 1300s. Stortorget is surrounded, as are the old parts of many European cities, by the Renaissance-era mansions of wealthy merchants (remember Kosice and Kracow?). It is also the scene of the famous (or infamous) Stockholm Bloodbath, when over 100 Swedish nobles and other leaders were murdered by the Danish King in the early 1500s, after having been promised amnesty for having fought to get rid of Danish rule. Among those murdered were Gustav Vasa’s father and brother, leading to him becoming convinced to lead yet another—this time successful—rebellion against Denmark, which caused Sweden to finally become its own nation (remember this from Uppsala and Leksand?). So as we sat at these cafes, including the Chocolate Café (yes, that’s right, a café dedicated to chocolate and other sweets), we looked out on a market square that was not only beautiful, but also the scene of an historical bloodbath. Oh, that’s right—probably most market squares were (once again, remember Kosice?).The yellow building has the chocolate cafe.

A few nights ago we ate at a restaurant that our guide book had recommended--Cafe Piastowska, a Polish restaurant with a cozy, small room upstairs, a small, cozy room downstairs in the basement, and a larger, cozy room next to that one in the basement. They had faked some of the old-looking elements of the place, but it was still a very old basement (This part of Stockholm is not as old as Gamla Stan, of course, and is probably originally from the Renaissance era. Nearby—just a few blocks from us—is one more important historical area—where the Battle of Brunkeberg was fought against the Danes). The food was excellent; we both had the special, bigos, which is the Polish national dish, also known as Hunters’ Stew. True Hunters’ Stew usually has some sort of game meet in it (boar, venison, rabbit) and sausage; this one had pork and sausage in it, along with the required mushrooms and sauerkraut. We each had our favorite beer from Poland, Zwiec, and Donald had an even better Czech one later, Zlatypramen. We shared the Polish "cheesecake," which is what in Poland is called "Bapci’s (grandma’s) cake" and in Slovakia, "baba’s cake," with the same meaning. Everyone’s grandma must make the same cake my own grandmas made :). I think that’s pretty funny.

Last Saturday we had drinks in the Hanging Bar, 125 feet up over the water, on Sodermalm (South Town). There is an amazing view of the whole city, as well as in all directions across the waterways, and we arrived while it was light out and left when it got dark (that was a few drinks later!). We were with our friends Ryzard (pronounced, as is my cousin’s name, “Reeshard,” with the stress on the first syllable) Sculken (a Polish political émigré to Sweden from about 1969) and his wife Anna, who is 6 months pregnant. Ryzard is a Jew whose mother survived the Warsaw ghetto, in the end, by being taken in as a young pregnant woman, by a Catholic Polish woman who hid her (as Ryzard puts it, at least his mother is one Jew who thinks Polish Catholics aren’t all terrible people). Both Ryzard and Anna are great company (thus the 4-hour “let’s meet for a drink” session).

Today we met our friend Karin (a doctoral student in the department where Don is working) in Gamla Stan, and we took a boat ferry across to Djurgarden (remember where the Vasa and Skansen are, where we biked?), where we walked in the brisk autumn parkland, where the yellow and orange leaves were thick on the ground. WE ate a delicious goulash lunch—along with hundreds of other Stockholmers—at an outdoor café in the park, which doubles as a plant nursery. So our seats—with blankets—were among the end-of-season flowers and bees. Then we continued walking along the water and then back into the city itself, finally stopping to have coffee and tea at yet another outdoor café before heading home at 5:00, just before the autumn sunset (the coming winter darkness, when the sun sets at about 2:00 p.m. by Christmas, is moving towards us quickly, as it needs to in order to lose so much sunlight soon. The daylight hours are noticeably shorter since the Equinox just a couple of weeks ago).

We have learned some important lessons about eating out in Stockholm. First, if there are lots of young people inside, don’t eat there. It will be crowded and noisy. Second, every single place you eat in Stockholm--or in Sweden, for that matter--will have shrimp and/or salmon on the menu. If it is a lunch place, one of the most popular dishes will be some sort of salad that has heaps of cold shrimp. Even the sushi is almost exclusively made of shrimp and salmon—called lax--, with perhaps some tuna thrown in. Third, there are LOTS of Italian places to eat, most of which are actually run by Turks and Kurds. Their pizza is stupendous, with the thinnest crust I have ever seen, being really crunchy and wonderful. There are also lots of Chinese places, and, of course, many “regular” Swedish places to eat. There are NOT many places to get Mexican food, nor “Chinese” places. Fourth, there are LOTS of “pubs” and Irish and British-style bars, though most of them will serve the ubiquitous Swedish beer and not much in the way of Irish or British beers. We went to one place that billed itself as “the original Irish Pub in Stockholm,” and could not get an Irish beer. They had had ONE on their menu, but no longer served it. It was QUITE disappointing J

And fifth—we were going to mention to Ryzard something that we had noticed, which is that the cafes, pubs and restaurants are FILLED with people younger than 35 years old, while it is almost impossible to see ANYONE older than that out in the evening for food or drinks. When one goes out at anywhere from about 4:00 p.m. on, it seems as though all of Stockholm is made of young adults, with no older adults existing at all. But he brought it up first, saying that Stockholm SEEMED to be a city of young people. The explanation is that Swedes do not share the general European fashion of going out for food and/or drinks; it is a very new phenomenon in Sweden, and therefore is something only the young do. The older adults never did it before, and are still staying home in the evening, cooking supper.

Oh, by the way, I’ve also realized one of the reasons the young women here are so skinny: they smoke like fiends! My guess is that the amount of booze and cigarettes one takes in is inversely related to the amount of food. Oh—except that they also eat the delicious sweets. Maybe the one thing missing from their diet is actual meals!

Gamla Stan

Me at the gateway going FROM the king's palace (it replaced the Palace of the Tre Kronor--three crowns--when it burned down in the 1600s) on Gamla Stan (Old Town), heading TO the tiny island where the Parliament meets. In summer, street musicians play here and the acoustics are amazing.

Gamla Stan, the original part of Stockholm, which is on its own island in Stockholm, first became a town in the late 1200s and early 1300s. Compared with places such as Italy, Greece, or even England, Sweden has relatively recent human habitation, as it took longer for it to recover from the literally miles-thick glacier sheet that covered it during the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. As I mentioned when describing Old Uppsala, numerous areas that are now islands or even mainland were covered by water until that last 1000 or 2000 years. Additionally, the earliest local settlements did NOT included Stockholm, which finally developed as a town because it could be used to guard the entrance to Lake Malaren and to collect tariffs from merchant ships on their way in and out of the lake. Most historians think that the name Stockholm comes from the word for stockade, as Gamla Stan was surrounded by a wooden palisade, out in the water, to protect it from attack. Hence Stockholm is Stockade Island ("holm" means island).

We went last weekend to the Museum of Medieval Stockholm and learned that there were a couple of monasteries and a convent on Gamla Stan in the 1300s. There was digging being done to build a car-park, and they discovered the foundations walls for the convent, and then found part of the original town wall. The museum is built right into these sights, with reconstructions of the original Old Town. It was pretty wonderful, as all the museums in Sweden have been so far.

one of the wonderful tiny medieval alleyways in Gamla Stan, that connect the narrow, cobble-stoned streets.

We FINALLY got to see the Old City Cathedral in Gamla Stan (we kept showing up past closing time or when they were having some sort of concert or whatever). This church (kyrka, pronounced “cheerka”) is one of the oldest in Stockholm, of course, being from the 1300s (and therefore having been built BEFORE the Reformation), and is the Royal Church. It has a 17^th century altar made of silver and ebony,

a set of Royal Pews

(the current king and his wife were married there in 1976, and the Crown Princess—meaning she will inherit the throne—got married there this past summer), and an amazing carved oak statue of St. George and the Dragon from 1489. The dragon has elk, moose and reindeer antlers sticking out from its head, and the whole thing is amazing.

Visiting the Vasa

I can't believe that I forgot to write about visiting the Vasa, a ship from the early 1600s that sank in Stockholm's waters on its maiden voyage, which was thankfully a "test drive," so only a "skeleton crew' died. After resurrecting the ship, they reconstructed the whole thing, and built the museum around it, telling us about Swedish empire-building, especially on the seas, in its golden age.
Original ship, above, and painted-to-original-color models of statues from the side of the ship, to the left.

The ship is amazing; it was clearly built in order to DISPLAY the might of Sweden and of her king; it was decorated with colorful animal heads, mythological beings, the heads of Roman Caesars, and openings for cannons. But, alas, it was not built to float; it was too top heavy, with rows of second and third floor cannon. With one good wave, the cannons rolled to the right; the Vasa took on water, and sank to the bottom of Stockholm harbor!


There were displays based on Swedish naval battles; others based on the reconstructed skeletons they found on board; and still more based on the numerous items found on board that were part of the kitchen, the sea men's gear and clothing, and the ship's medical gear. Those pictured here are, of course, models.

Family history and graves

Here is the grave of my great-grandmother, Maria Beer (sometimes spelled Ber, but pronounced just like that lovely drink we are all so familiar with), who was born in Myslava, which was village outside the historically important (to the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) town/city of Kosice (Koh-shits-ze, with the emphasis on the first syllable, Koh). Her family, the Beers, is still evident in Myslava, which is now a suburb, but still has the little "downtown" area of small houses near the church of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, built in 1788.
Maria Beer's grave needs some work on it. First, the plaque itself could simply be made more noticeable and readable by having some black paint put on the letters (the bottom bit says "rest in peace") . Second, a new plaque could be made, which gives her birth name AND marriage name, and her birth and death dates. The vast majority of women's graves give both their birth and marriage names, but Maria's only has the marriage name. When she died, the people around who took care of her did not have money to do the typical plaque.
Third, the grave itself is collapsing.

The concrete that covers her is has crumbled and the whole thing is caving in. It could either be fixed, or she could be placed in the grave with her husband, Jan Tomaskovic, my great-grandfather. Normally, this is what is done--husbands and wives are placed together.

You see here my great-grandfather's grave, which is in much better shape, but which also needs a better plaque, with more information on it, and with gthe letters blackened so they are more readable. This is something that people typically do, I guess, when they visit the cemeteries: they bring blackening or gold paint with them, to touch up the lettering.

The Tomaskovic family had moved down from Bankov Mountain, from the village of Vyzne (pronounced Vizhny) Klatov, or at Jan's parents and siblings had. Some Tomaskovics were obviously still in Vyzne Klatov, as there are more recent graves up there with the name on them. I haven't figured out yet how they are related to us.

Jan's father, Stefan, who sounds like a dreadful man, did not like the wife his son Jan had chosen (Maria Beer) and so he cut them off, refusing to see them or his own grandchildren, who included my grandpa, John. He was mean and spiteful, from the stories I've heard. My great-grandparents left Myslava for Michigan, where Maria's brothers had moved, and, just as most European non-Jewish immigrants did, they moved back and forth between America and Slovakia many times. My grandpa was born in Michigan, becoming an American citizen, but moved back to America as young man. One time while his parents were staying in Myslava, Jan died, and Maria decided to stay there when her now-adult children all moved back to America. The Tomaskovic family refused to take care of her, their son's widow, and her own family had moved to the States. So she moved in with her best friends, who were also her next-door-neighbors, the Solar family, who were also her daughter, Margita (Margaret)'s in-laws (Margaret had married Jiri/George Solar).
Now I know that's more than most of you want to know, but it explains who Gita, the woman in the photo we posted last time, is. She is a Solar, one of the family who took in my great-grandmother, and therefore takes care of the graves of my great-grandparents. MArion, my father's cousin who met us there, is also a Solar, the daughter of Margaret (born Tomaskovic) and George Solar.From left to right are Gita, me and Marion.

Anyway, I am thinking that the family needs to take up a small collection to fix the grave/s. I know that most of my family will never go tho Myslava to see these graves, but it feels bad to me to have my great-grandmother's grave crumble and cave in, and to have their plaques not say when they lived and died, and that they were married.