1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

Definitions of stress

1. Driving along at normal speed along a two-lane highway with your 90-year-old mother-in-law bundled up in the passenger seat on the way home to Hamburg in the late afternoon when you see a small car pulling out to pass a semi-trailer coming against you and think well since I’ve got the lights on he’ll see me and pull back in behind the truck but then you realise the jerk is actually going to try to pass the semi-trailer with his gutless wonder and just when you think the two of you are going to smash into each other head-on any second you hit the binders and veer off to roll through the rough grass shoulder leaning on the horn and screaming FUCK! WHAT AN IDIOT! as he’s still only half-way past the semi which has also pulled over as far as he can without landing in the ditch and you’re wishing you’d had the presence of mind to get the guy’s license number but of course all you can think of at a time like that is trying to stay on the road to make sure the both of you don’t get killed.

2. The body’s reaction to the mind’s desire to choke the living shit out of some driver who really deserves it.

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Taking for granted what can’t be replaced

Dear all,

I was clicking through a long list of expatriates in Germany the other day and came across a post that touched me deeply.

My mother-in-law had been visiting for a couple of weeks and I must admit we were all getting a bit frazzled with the extra workload someone pushing 90 can bring on. Quite frankly, we were looking forward to her being picked up soon by a relative and brought back home to the countryside. Besides, the inadvertent wheelchair acrobatics were getting to be a little more excitement than I could handle.

Most of the time I am interested in what she has to say, so much so that not too long ago I sat with her with my camcorder rolling and interviewed her, getting her to talk about her family, what it was like growing up, how she was forced to flee her home with a toddler in tow to go live like a refugee, the penury of the war and the years right after, the rebuilding of their lives. I thought that one day, we all might want to have these stories to look back on.

But as with many older people, they get to recounting the same things over and over, and I must admit I have tuned her out a few times over the years.

If you haven’t stumbled upon it already, go and read the post I found.

Update: that blog has been taken down.

I wanted to leave her a comment, but under the circumstances I guess she doesn’t much feel like blogging, because the comment are closed.

So this is my comment to you, island girl:

Your father-in-law sounds like a man whose heart was always in the right place, right to the very end: with the woman he so obviously adored, with the family he cherished. Your writing this has made me think hard about my own family and how we sometimes take for granted what can’t be replaced. Herzliches Beileid.

all for now,

Ian

Screaming OH MY GOD while Granny does a backflip

Sunny Sunday, no real plans, just get out and enjoy the warmth and that special atmosphere that only a German Sunday can offer. So after cleaning my clock at Monopoly the little red-haired girl helps me bundle Granny – known as Oma around these parts – into her wheelchair so the three of us can all go out for a Sunday stroll. Our destination: down to the Elbe waterfront.

The bus comes, so we head inside after the friendly bus driver lowers the platform for Oma’s wheelchair. Carefully observing the sign on the wall, I turn the chair in the reverse direction as indicated and set the brakes.

At the central bus station we all pile off and do the same thing when our connecting bus comes, only this time while setting the brakes the little red-haired girl and I are already deep into a conversation about skunks.

We sit down facing Oma and the bus pulls out.

“Have you ever been sprayed by a skunk?” she asks me.

“Nope. I’ve been pretty lucky. But I did run over one once. It was with the first car I ever owned and it must have been cursed because I’d only had it for two days when I ran over it.

“What’s cursed?”

“It means something or someone that for some reason gives you nothing but problems from the start. Anyway, some friends were along for a spin and it was at night and I sort of saw the thing in front of me but by then it was too late and then we heard this THUNK and right away the whole car reeked to high heaven. It stank for two years. Well, it actually only smelled bad for about three months. But for a couple of years you’d catch a whiff of skunk every once in a while. By the way, do you know the only thing that works to get the smell off if you do get sprayed?”

“Yeah, tomato juice. You told me before.”

“Right. I think there’s some acid in it or something that dissolves whatever’s so bad in their spray.”

“Too bad you didn’t wash your car with tomato juice!”

“Nah, that would have been pretty hard. The thing was splattered all over the wheel housing – that’s the part that covers the wheel – and I sprayed it over and over again, but the smell like I said took a long time to

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!

By this time we’ve already made one stop and rounded a corner and gone through the light and turned another corner and we’re headed down to the Elbe waterfront, which is kinda steep. The bus driver for some reason hit the brakes and Oma, with nothing but fresh air behind her, was doing a slow-motion backflip onto the floor. Never changed expression, never said anything, just tipped backward until she was staring straight up at the ceiling.

So in the instant I’m lunging forward way too late to be of any use it flashes through my mind that somehow I’m going to have to explain to my wife that her mother – a woman who lived through the worst of the Second World War by having to abandon her ancestral home to flee the advancing Red Army and live like a refugee for four years with a small child while her husband wasted away in a prisoner of war camp never knowing for the longest time whether he was dead or alive and who scrimped and saved to bring up her family and made it almost to the start of her 10th decade – was finally done in by the negligence of some twit Canadian who may have set the brakes, but didn’t stand behind her wheelchair just in case.

But as I lean down I realise the reason she’s not the least bit upset is because her head is being cradled by two feet – two feet which are placed in the footrests of ANOTHER wheelchair placed it just so happens in exactly the right spot to catch her head as she fell backwards.

The other passengers and the bus driver are all over us at the same time, making sure everything’s OK and that she’ safe and sound, and demonstrating the best way to position the wheelchair to make sure it doesn’t happen again. They suggested sideways, but basically any direction will do as long as you STAND BESIDE IT.

Oma later said she thought I was more rattled by the whole thing than she was. She’s right. We were going to start our walk along the Elbe straight away, but I needed time to let the shakes die down. We headed to the beach where she watched the little red-haired girl and I throw the football around and get sand in our shoes.

Note to self: Use your head. Don’t always pay attention to the instructions.

© 2007 lettershometoyou