Too Late, He Gets to Know His Neighbor

She was Gerda, my next-door neighbor for the last 10 years and separated from me only by a relatively thin living room wall. She even had a spare key to my townhouse.

And now she’s dead, a 94-year-old woman whom I knew but really didn’t. I knew her in the sense that we’d chat on those rare times when she was out front, working in her immaculate garden with the hibiscus plants and others I couldn’t identify, and I’d be rushing to or from somewhere. Or, I would see her sitting in her chair by the front window with the blinds open, and I’d wave and she’d wave back.

“I’d like to talk, but I’ve got to get going,” I said more than once.

I knew her enough to have her collect my mail when I was on vacation or scoop up my newspapers, but I didn’t know her the way you should know someone who’s friendly and whose life nearly spanned the century and who probably had stories to tell.

Had I taken a moment to slow down at any point in those 10 years, I bet I could have cajoled her into telling me about her life. But, whether a casualty of urban life--where lots of us don’t know our neighbors--or simply a matter of thinking I’d do it “some other time,” it never happened.

I knew her enough to attend her memorial service last Saturday morning in Newport Beach, where about 25 friends and relatives met in the alcove of a cemetery park and talked about her life and times.

And as people told stories and passed around a family photo album--showing this woman I’d first met when she was 84 as a girl and young woman--my longtime neighbor finally and completely emerged.

Gerda Christjansen was born in Denmark in 1904. One of the first things her daughter, Dorte, said at the service was that her mother gave birth to her during an air raid in 1943. And how the family dachshund learned “to bark at Nazis” during the days of the German occupation in World War II. And that Gerda’s husband, a member of the Danish Resistance, spent part of the war in a German concentration camp. And that Gerda and her two young children fled the city and lived in the country with an aunt.

I learned she and her entire family contracted influenza during the great outbreak after World War I and how she later contracted polio. I learned she specialized for a time in treating people with tuberculosis and once worked in a sanatorium.

I learned that my neighbor emigrated from Denmark to Canada in 1949 and soon separated from her husband. As a career nurse and single mother in Canada and then America, Gerda raised two children. And I learned that her son died in the mid-1960s when only 30.

The service was emotional and celebratory, but realizing I’d only heard part of Gerda’s story, I phoned her daughter this week for other details.

Dorte Christjansen, an art professor at Cal State Fullerton, says she remembers her family arriving by freighter in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty.

With her parents divorced, Gerda and the two children eventually settled in California in the late 1950s. Dorte remembers that during one of those early months in California, her mother didn’t have enough money to pay the rent.

The family moved to Laguna Beach, where Gerda worked at South Coast Medical Center before retiring about 1970. In 1973, she moved up the coast to Huntington Beach, where she lived until the last two weeks of her life.

I ask Dorte what sticks out when she looks back on her mother’s life. “The decision one makes over that time,” she says, “the decision to move to a new country and how hard that is to change customs and language, how noble and brave she was. She never complained, never talked ill of my father in front of my brother and me. She bore everything with great dignity and responsibility. I know she missed Denmark terribly, but when I’d ask if she wanted to move back, she’d say, ‘No, it’s different.’ ”

Her mother loved to entertain, Dorte says. “She said she wasn’t artistic, but to me she was an artist. She made beautiful homes wherever she was. She had an innate sense of design and placement. Food, the same way. Food was beautifully and lovingly cooked. She enjoyed seeing people wolf it down, but it was always presented. The table had crystal and silver and porcelain, everything in a setting.”

I saw little of Gerda in her last few months. When I would, and I’d ask how she felt, she’d invariably reply, “I’m getting too old.”

I ask Dorte if her mother feared dying. Just the opposite, she says.

“She was so ready to go. What I heard on a regular but not whining basis the last couple years was, ‘I’m really ready for my wings.’ That’s what she called it. She’d say, ‘This is very natural. I have to die. I don’t want you to be sad when I’m gone.’ ”

One shouldn’t lament a life well lived, so I’m not. I only lament not taking more time to get to know my neighbor.

A little too late, I found out what I missed.

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Readers may reach Dana Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com