Christmas Eve – Remembrance and Discovery

I spent the Eve as I normally did, at my mother’s. But she wasn’t there. This was always the night of celebration in our German family even though my sister has gone American with Christmas Day now the celebratory day. And I left the big holiday for my mother to enjoy with grandchildren and great grand children, from which they excluded me. Which was fine as I never enjoyed the over the top gift giving, the football on TV and over sweet American deserts.
I wanted to be in her home. It no longer has the pervasive method smell of her last years. And it was quiet. The bottle of wine for on the table cleared to start going through the paper ephemera of her life.
My entire life was in her sphere of influence. I thought I knew her well. But there were little surprises. Lots of handwritten notes in her old- fashioned European script. There are two paper presentation folders (reused, of course) full of jokes. Tucked in the pocket are small notepads with handwritten jokes in them. The folders contain photocopies of joke poems, a cartoon or two, lots of funny stories. I had no idea she collected jokes. The funny thing is she was horrible at telling jokes. Her timing was off, she missed the punch line, stories told out-of-order, but she didn’t care. Funniest was at the end as she laughed at her own jokes!
Some jokes were really funny and I needed that last night.
I found her collection of articles and awards relating to her hospice work. She helped found the group after the death of my father, a group that she would have liked available with his terminal illness. In this collection I found her handwritten speech that she gave a hospice group on her own immigrant experience. I enjoyed reading her misspelled English, which makes the words sound exactly as she spoke them. Most startlingly was how dedicated an American she was. I tried to find the date of the speech to uncover the motivation for her strongly worded pride in America.
Lots of recipes! Dishes she never made, which is how it goes with most of us. She also wrote down some of her German recipes. And the old German cookbooks she used as a reference source; covers hanging, pages torn. There are several newer cookbooks on German cooking that people would find in book sales and give to her. Note this – older people have been cooking their specialty dishes and cultural cuisines for years, so why are you giving them these books.
There was the box with the Memory Book from the funeral home for my father’s death. I read the extra copies of his death certificate and obituaries in several papers, including a German language paper. 80 people attended his funeral and 35 cars in the drive to the cemetery. Hers was a much simpler funeral with cremation to follow and no drive to the gravesite.
She saved all the greeting cards sent her over the years. Had I know that? She placed them in photo albums, two thick ones. I know she picked cards with great card looking for sentimental greetings that expressed the saccharine sentiments of Hallmark. I couldn’t send those; they rang so artificial and false. That was a big difference between my sister and myself. She was big a greeting card tailored for every shit holiday on the calendar; I was big on personal visits. Would I have sent more had I know she was keeping a record.
Going through photo albums that I thought I knew my heart I still found little surprises. There were a couple of ancestor photos I didn’t know she had. Did I ever see her picture as a German Red Cross worker in 1942? There is a lot I’ve forgotten. Then I found an album I had never seen, pictures from her 80th birthday given by my sister which I attended. My mother never showed me this album. Probably because I am not in a single photo. That caught me cold. My sister already harbored such animosity back then? My mother was aware of this yet still pushed me these last years to include my sister, to call my sister, which resulted in disaster.
I spend 6 hours sorting, remembering, discovering, crying, drinking. I thought back to what might I have done differently. Would it have changed the outcome. I considered our sibling relationship over the years, I younger by 6 years, from my earliest memory and it never was close, more like simply sharing the same living quarters.
Her cell phone was on the table, smeared with face cream. I checked her the voice mail and scrolled through recent calls. Her last conversation was with a granddaughter at 8:54 pm. The next morning calls go unanswered.
I reflected on what I should or could have done differently in my mother’s last year. Her personality got her through war, turmoil, being driven from her homeland, refugee camps and immigration. She fought getting old, hated giving in or slowing down. It was easiest to give in and not fight about matters be they finances, medical care, or getting proper resources for hearing problems. Yes, I should have visited more. Funny, I resented more that she so rarely received visits from grandchildren who lived one half mile away and so felt the burden should again fall just on me. But it pains me to think of how much time she was alone in her apartment – she read, cooked her soups, got her recipes ready for a Christmas party for her card group, she watched some TV, she played scrabble, but was largely alone. Especially at her death.

Gone and Forgotten

One of the favorite phrases seen on older tombstones, say before the 1900’s is “gone, but not forgotten’.
As a visit to any cemetery will show, they are forgotten. And not only because they’ve been dead 100 years.
Last Saturday I decided to take advantage of the lovely day with a trip to a cemetery. I had already been outside all morning. And I knew my mother would come along because it means a ride in the car and maybe a little standing around outside; at 91 she has increasing limitations on activities.
Not just a cemetery at random, but check out the resting place of my sister’s mother-in-law who died last December. Her ashes were interred in her husband’s family plot in any old Catholic graveyard in the southwest area of Detroit, near the Ford Rouge plant.
Dorothy is the one who ever since we knew her we assumed she was as Irish as her husband. She honored the Irish high holidays, decorated her home in green furnishings, loved Belleek porcelain and British vases and those god-ugly Toby jugs. Lo and behold when one day I stuck her name in FamilySearch and found she was Polish! A story for another time.
The last time Mom and I ventured to this cemetery was 2000 when her husband Jerry died. His body was buried here, but Dorothy chose cremation so only her urn of ashes fill the plot. We found the family plot without too much driving around. Fortunately it is a fairly small cemetery and it was a nice day to drive around in spite of the industrial noise.
The Holy Cross Cemetery sits in a stark industrial area. Bounded by a railway on one side, on two sides it is flanked by Detroit Iron & Metals mountains of stone or pellets. They sprayed the mountains to contain the dust that still managed to settle over everything.
Most the graves dated to the 1920’s and 30’s. And the names were overwhelmingly Polish. It was a veritable unprouncable phone directory for Krakow or maybe Posnan. How aware was Dorothy of this? I know she rarely, if ever, visited her husband’s grave.
The tombstones were large – and since this was not a graveyard for Detroit’s rich and famous I wondered about the burden this placed on the families to have such large family stones. The practice here was individual small markers, then a large, erect family name memorial. If the family of Dorothy’s husband was typical, these were working class people. They lived in Detroit’s Corktown, the old Irish section.
The stones were all discolored by years of Rouge plant pollution. The black sat in a layer along the top and ran down the front of the stones. There was a large, marble Pieta atop one stone; Mary’s face was eaten away and gave her the look of a leper. A finger of Jesus was near falling off. It was representative of the bodies beneath.
We viewed the of Dorothy’s family by marriage. Noted all the sons buried there and of course the mother and father. But missing were wives! How did Dorothy slip in? But the flat, individual stones were hard to read being nearly covered by encroaching grass. The family left, the son of Jerry, Jerry’s grandchildren and several great grandchildren, don’t visit. Ever. One granddaughter has come on occasion for her grandfather Jerry. The rest are forgotten, their stones and lives taken over by a thatch of thick grass. No one wants to remember who they were, when they lived, figure out their relationship to the others. I had a garden tool to place some dried flowers, but it wasn’t enough to tackle the overgrown grass. I needed a spade. With my foot I worked to push aside the grass as we tried to read the stones and follow the family history. It isn’t our family. But we have not graves left for our ancestors that we can visit anywhere. The Russians and the East Germans took care of that.
I was puzzled that the cemetery seemed to have a sort of class system in effect. The graveyard was divided by the roads into the prominent mounds of the front sections, and then mounded, round central areas. Toward the back the land was more flat. In viewing the cemetery from the back to front, an area of no tress to the larger trees up front something became clear. Several areas only had large gravestones; all the small grave markers were together in a separate area. I’m not sure I’ve ever seem such segregation of gravestones by size. How do they manage that? When a family buys a plot how can they be assured they will place a large family marker there? Further, the small stones were in order by date of death: 1931 followed by 1932, followed by 1933.
Another oddity, or rather a sadness visited on too many cemeteries now days. I noted several gravestones with the imprint of a large, empty, oval space. There were several. A practice in ethnic cemeteries back 60 years and more was to put an enameled photo of the deceased on the gravestone. These were missing. At the front of the cemetery, near an administration building were the most significant tombstones – large, imposing blocks of stone. They still had photos. I got old of the car to look more closely. I find it a nice touch to view the dead, as they or the family wanted them remembered. These enameled portraits all had chip marks on them; someone had tried to remove them, without success, so far.
From Holy Cross Cemetery I could see gravestones at Detroit’s venerable old Woodmere Cemetery. We drove over there. Now here were truly the rich and once famous. This cemetery too, has dealt with vandalism. The mausoleum doors has been removed by the vandal hoards and are now boarded up with plywood. No longer can you look inside to see the light shine through stained glass or to view the inside decorations. And they too are forgotten.

The Trials of Family

For all practical purposes, going forward I will tell people I have no family, except for an elderly mother. I am now ostracized because of a fight with my sister, the crazy mingebox.
She is so overwhelmingly negative about life. I don’t know where she because such a bitter person, unable to enjoy anything. Maybe it is her morbidly obese husband who can sit through a family gathering and not say a word to anyone.
She bemoans her poverty-stricken childhood, how much money everything costs, how much nicer everyone else has their homes, gardens, lives. Yet she has money but her only interest in life is shopping, yet she needs nothing.
We had a fight when I asked her to drive me to my colonoscopy. You can’t get one unless you have a driver because you get sedated. On the ride there we got in a fight when I asked her to give me a chance to finish a sentence. She constantly interrupts with a tirade of rants against the universe. Boy, because of my request I unleashed a flood of accusations.
My fear was that she might not be reliable to take me to the hospital, or not take me home. I realized I also needed to have an emergency number and didn’t have my cell phone in an attempt to take few belongings with me. She flatly refused to give me the numbers of any family members. And here I am about to be sedated for a procedure and totally at her mercy.
I told her that everyone was right, she is a bitch. She was taken aback, not by being called a bitch, but wanted to know ‘who’ else had said this!
I got through the procedure and back home. She was paid money and I told her I will never, ever ask anything of her again.
Well she told her daughter about a fight we had, details of which I don’t know but can imagine. Now my niece doesn’t invite me because of that. I’m not cure whether her mother told her she won’t attend if I’m there, or what.
I’m sorely disappointed in my niece, and family as a whole. My sister has a history of these sorts of conflicts with her own kids, where she refuses to speak with them. In February she refused to attend her 3-year old grandson’s birthday party because she can’t stand his other grandparents. That is just one incident.
So I have deleted nieces from my cell phone. They don’t call anyway. For the past year I have tried to be a nice family member, attending events, not holding grudges, even inviting my sister and her fat husband to my birthday lunch (oh, they are such dull, uninteresting guests) all to no avail. It was also to somewhat placate my mother who wants that perfect family. Her need to control and pretend the family is greeting card happy is a big part of the problem.
I never got along with my sister, 6 years older. I don’t even remember her in my own childhood – I see her in family photos, but don’t remember her. She is dull witted, has a real negative aura, complains without having any facts.
I have to reconcile that I am going to be alone. This shit is why I lived 3 hours away for 25 years. They are not my support network and I have develop other relationships for such.

Ah, Wedding

My niece’s wedding day. This is the niece with the celebration event for which she mailed the invites first leaving us to wonder about the wedding – were they already married, was there a ceremony, will we be invited, well, to something?
Yes we, the immediate blood family received the invitation to a wedding held two days before the celebration (or perhaps it would be better to say the celebration is held two days after the wedding).
At any rate, it truly was a nice ceremony, very simple, easy, allowing for participation of nieces and nephews. The bride’s dress was lovely in its simplicity. No veil – good to let go a dated tradition more suitable for Berber tribes than 2010 western society. The children strew flower petals and the two nephews got guns shooting bubbles – cool. That got their active participation.
Traditional ceremony with a Lutheran pastor (groom is actual a born Lutheran also). Originally they were going to hold it outdoors in the Rose Garden, but fortunately it rained and they had it inside. It was hot and humid, the rain just made it more humid. Then we had drinks and a toast afterward. The entire group of made 35 people then heading to a restaurant for dinner.
Several people tried the annoying custom of tapping on glass to make the bride and groom kiss repeatedly. My mother was among the worst with that. The sensible couple didn’t always respond.
Perhaps this ceremony is what comes of waiting until your late 30’s to get married.
The food was okay, the drinks better. You know I never LIKE anything, much. Okay is pretty good; it’s all relative.
It was my first meeting of the groom. Not real close with any of my nieces in that I first met all the husbands at the wedding. This guy wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought he was a personal trainer – hardly. I saw that right away. He is in catering. Perhaps he can be of help with my coffee shop idea.
So tomorrow it the celebration. Lots of family and friends, people I haven’t seen in years. I suppose it will be nice to catch up. I’ll work on my social skills: “Yes, we’ll get together soon.” “Sure, I’ll come up and visit you.” “And you have pictures of ALL your children and grandchildren! How wonderful, give me a minute and I’ll be right over to look at your shoebox of photos.”
It does interfere with the losers World Cup Game. That starts at 2:30, celebration at 3:00.
There will be a bouncy house for the children. Think I could get drunk enough to give it a try? Likely it will be hot and sunny; what else will they have to eat besides barbeque food? Where are the Boca Burgers?

Photos of Lives Forgotten

My mother gave me the latest plastic bag full of photographs and documents belonging to my aunt who died in her Arizona home last March. This bag was sent to us by the realtor who is handling clean up and sale of the house. Her crew cleaned up everything and sold what they could. Got some $1,000 which was agreed they would keep as their fee for cleaning up. But even after family went through looking for anything worth keeping there was a lot of stuff missing – title to the car, car keys, old passports, etc. Well now they found them. And the neighbor is willing to buy the house for $25,000. Yes that is all it will fetch; is sorely in need of maintainance. In good years it might have got $50,000.
I love going through old photos, even of other people. It’s sort of voyeuristic. While the people of interest, the backgrounds, settings, clothing, how places looked years ago are of more interest. In the 1950’s everyone dressed up. They look hot! How will we appear to generations down the line, besides fat?
I found a business card for a gynecologist. Wonder if my aunt had some problems during the 1950’s when they lived in Venezuela. I think the notes on the back refer to an appointment, but then there are also some numbers, like amounts. Cost of a procedure?
I realize how little we know of people. Should have gone over these pictures when my aunt was alive, but she didn’t disclose anything. She didn’t talk about her life experiences.
Is this what my nieces will do with my pictures when I’m dead? There are a lot of photos of people and gatherings they know nothing about. Some even I’ve forgotten.

Poor Dad – Maybe Not

On Sunday evening, Father’s Day, I took a bag of garbage to the dumpster. Floating up against the top of the container were three shiny, colorful Father’s Day balloons. They were already in the dumpster in the early evening of Father’s Day!
Who throws away special occasion balloons? Don’t most people keep them until they deflate? Then you can subtly put them in a garbage bag and they don’t float out to haunt you.
So was it a father who discarded them? Or perhaps a child who had second thoughts on this gift.
I’m thinking if I were the child and reconsidered the gesture, I would probably be angry and would pop the balloons wanting to see them burst!
So why would a parent discard them? Hates the kid, dislikes false sentimentality?
Guess it could also be they were left over somewhere and needed to be thrown away. I might still like the bright shiny things to hang around awhile. They would probably scare the cats.
Wonder if they escaped when the truck emptied out the dumpster. Imagine them floating away to freedom…landing somewhere where somebody else wonders about poor Dad whose balloons escaped.

Necessity of Attendance Ch 6/pg 5

Back then people believed that fingernails and hair kept growing out after death, even though in reality that’s not what happens. And when a person died in winter, the family might have to store the body for a while, at least until a grave could be dug in the solid, frozen earth with hand shovels.
When Edith was age six and Herta five, one of their schoolmates died. Mama wasn’t on good terms with the neighbors, which was pretty typical for her. She wasn’t going to the funeral under any circumstance, not matter how much it killed her to stay home. Of course, she didn’t want to appear nosy or interested, but was nosy and interested to know all the details of the funeral – whose was there, what food was served, clothes people wore, what was talked about. So she sent her two daughters instead to attend the wake at the house a kilometer distant. The girls wore their finest, starched dresses as they were pushed out their door to go check on things for Mama.
At the wake the little Redetzki emissaries stood dutifully in front of the casket. The custom then was to sit around the room with the body laid out on a table. They watched all the people, who was there, who wasn’t, what they wore, who they talked to. When the food was served, they ate, of course. No one thought anything odd about the presence of two little girls unaccompanied by their mother since many people did send children in lieu of adult family members. And these little girls were familiar to the neighbors. Many came to pay respects, but many are also there to see and be seen, a social event for the rural communities who didn’t have other venues where they could gather and exchange information. The whole village showed up, a bigger gathering than turned up even at a wedding. Weddings, confirmations and baptisms – these were events that marked rites of passage in a family and witnessed by the community.

Call me When it’s Over

My niece, B. is getting married. Or at least she is having a reception in celebration of her marriage. The event is not a surprise – she has been living with this guy for ages. But because her parents and siblings don’t like him, he doesn’t attend any family events, she always comes alone. And you can’t go to her house to visit; she won’t answer the door. Forget about waiting for an invitation.
So she is having this casual outing at the home of a friend of HIS family, way out of town, maybe 40 minutes. Her own parents and both sisters have houses with large yards in the city and at least 1 for sure, and another maybe, would love to hold the event! But none of her own family are involved ina nay way with the event.
I hear from her older sister M. that there is to be a wedding ceremony with a few select guests invited at some outdoor garden.
Doesn’t one usually invite people to the wedding first, and then send the reception invite? I didn’t get invited to the wedding. Maybe I won’t make the cut. But then M. didn’t get an invite either and her daughter is a flowergirl.
And I have no idea what to even get her for a wedding gift. I called her right after I hear the news through the family grapevine, to congratulate her and invite her and her beloved to dinner to celebrate. It’s been two weeks now and I haven’t heard back.
What about a shower? Perhaps since she is being so non-traditional she wants to forgo the standard shower stuff. Well I just found out from M. that M. was told she better give B. a date fast if she plans to hold a shower. She is really booked up with other showers. Guess what, maybe if you gave your family some clues as to what is going on they could plan a shower for you! Other people are getting advance notice and info.
I take this all as her way of saying I really don’t want my family there but am too much of a coward to tell them.
I told M. to not make herself crazy trying to quickly hold a shower. It is hard to determine who to invite to a shower when you have no idea who has even been invited to the celebration or ceremony.
I suppose I will have to give a gift. Maybe I should make it a dinner gift certificate for the celebration dinner she can’t be bothered with. I was going to call relatives in Germany to get some nice crystal or Wusthof carving set, but maybe a set of towels will be more in keeping with the tone of things.

Communists aren’t under our Beds

News from an acquaintance in Germany:
Silvi’s mom basically squandered everything she had. The government had already assessed the children’s income and wealth in order to ask them to contribute to their mothers monthly nursing home bill (Pflegegeld). She didn’t have a big pension either. The stuff she amassed 20 years ago which had value were expensive books which Silvi and her brother had to throw in the dumpster when she moved into the nursing home. The library (and nobody else for that matter) didn’t want them. So in the end there are a few photo albums left and clothing that nobody wants. The good people at the nursing home added to the memorable experience. While Silvia had intended to donate clothing and other items to less fortunate inhabitants of the home, the management already helped themselves distributing stuff among the old folk without her consent. When Silvia arrived the next day at the home, she found the rest sitting in the room, carelessly stuffed into blue garbage bags. Only in Germany …. The little money that was left covered the funeral. Case closed. Silvi can now go on with her life. This is Socialism in a former Communist state.

After reading about Silvi’s mom, it kills me when Americans call Obama a socialist. A young women in my census class made a statement about the government becoming communist. I told her you say that only because you have no idea what it is real communism or totalitarian state is like. She didn’t say anything else.
And I put forward that if you ask any refugee who came to the US (from lovely places like Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, China, etc) if this country is now becoming one of those awful ‘socialist’ totalitarian states, they will tell you NO. My parents never thought this country was getting like Communist East Germany (except when I was forced to contribute to the United Way!). The ones making these claims (Palin, Tea Party) just don’t know what their talking about. I read that there was a protester at U of M Saturday that had a Obama sign with a hammer and sickle on it. He is showing what an idiot he is.
Americans are really such wimps. If someone cuts back on their soda pop consumption, it’s communism. What do they call it when someone kills your family because they are a different ethnic group? Or you they force you to join a radical political party in order to go to college. Or you have to spy on family and friends so you can keep your job?