Remembering my mother on her 110th birthday

My mother was born 110 years ago today (March 25) at a Midwifery Institute in Celle, Germany. It was the middle of the First World War and her father was out of the picture. I grew up with rumors of what happened to him - we knew he was still alive and raising a.second family - but details were sparse. All we knew is that Bertha Rühmann, whom I knew as Grossmutter, was effectively a single parent of twenty who had no viable means of raising a child. 

One of Bertha's sisters, Johanne, was married to a man named Paul Gundelach and living in his home town of Braunschweig. Johanne had just had a child as well, Paul Jr., about a month before my mother was born, and took my mother in.  Living in a country which has just lost a World War was a challenge, but the Gundelachs lived on a farm and had food to eat.  Her daughter now cared for, Bertha got a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line and traveled the world.

Sometime in the next eight years Paul and Johanne were able to make a deal with an uncle named Henry Aust who had emigrated to America some years before to sponsor them as indentured servants and in 1923 Paul finally fulfilled a vow he had made to himself watching soldiers being blown to bits in Russia. He and his wife, Johanne, their son Paul Jr. and their niece/adopted daughter, climbed aboard the good ship Bayern in Hamburg and sailed away to a new life in America, landing in New York on October 26, 1923 and making their way to Torrington, Connecticut, where Henry Aust called home.

Paul and Johanne Gundelach legally adopted my mother - she had come across the ocean as Klara Schultheis, her original birth name - and had two more children, Carl (written American-style, with a C) and Rose (a name which worked equally well in both German and English). That adoption notwithstanding, four years later, Grossmutter's ship docked in New York and she made her way to Torrington, where she decided she had no choice but to stay, take my mother back, and live happily ever after in America.

Carl and his wife had two children, eventually, and Rose and her husband had three, giving me a bunch of cousins to grow up with on my mother's side of the family, to match the four I had on my father's side. The families remained close and it wasn't long before Johanne and Paul Gundelach became known by everybody in the family and far beyond as Mutti and Vati - the German equivalent of mommy and daddy.

Gundelach family gathering circa 1955
back row first four heads: Uncle Paul, My father, Uncle Carl, me
next row in, from left: Aunt Rose, Vati, Mutti, Klärchen (my mother), Aunt Connie, Grossmutter, Uncle Pete (Grossmutter's third husband)
front row: three kids: cousin Nancy (Uncle Carl/Aunt Connie's daughter); my sister Karen,  cousin Jimmy, Nancy's brother

Mutti and Vati continued to refer to my mother as their daughter.  They called her Klärchen, as they had when she was a little girl.  I often reflected on the fact that I had not the normal two, but three, sets of grandparents - and with them all the extra aunts, uncles and cousins. We have not kept in close contact, but the connection among the few survivors are still there.  My sister, the tallest of the three kids in front of my mother, turns 80 this year and is a great-grandmother.

My mother died of a heart attack at the young age of 60. Today she would be 110, and I am acutely aware she has been gone for a full half century.

As the years go by, my fantasy of finding a time machine only grows stronger.  If I could go back in time, I would want to get my mother out of bed and to a doctor rather than take a pill and see how she felt in the morning - a decision which was to be her last.  I'd also enjoy getting to know her as a woman twenty-five years younger than me.

All the questions I would bug her with.

So many questions.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

 

Remember Executive Order 9066 and Nuanced Thinking

Living in a Japanese-American household (we even have a dog named Sachiko), I couldn't fail to mark the anniversary last week of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.  Compared with the battle between truth and accuracy and manipulation of and by the media, Executive Order 9066 may feel like a  back burner item.  But it shouldn't. It's part of the same story.

On February 19, 1942, following the failure to distinguish Japanese immigrants to the United States from Japanese loyal to the Japanese Emperor and in support of the bombing of Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Roosevelt determined that Japanese ethnicity was sufficient reason to rip ordinary Japanese-Americans from their homes and ship them - 120,000 of them - to ten internment camps away from the West Coast: Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.

Nearly 72,000 of these were American citizens and we now know that all but a tiny slice of that population were indistinguishable from other immigrants to the U.S., saw it as their only home, and had no reason to work against its best interests. It was a crude political action, based on the racist belief that ethnicity and culture are indistinguishable from political loyalty. Throwing them out of their homes and seizing their property cost the Japanese-American community a net income loss of $2.7 billion dollars, calculated in 1983 dollars.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has produced a superb memorial on this, the 83rd anniversary of this black mark on American democracy, which you can view here.

I say this insult to the civil rights of American citizens is tied to modern-day events because it's obvious the same lack of nuanced thinking and behavior is currently front-and-center. One of the participants in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center presentation argues Executive Order 9066 was not an exception to the American Way but part of its legacy. Genocide of the American native population, slavery and segregation, police brutality based on race, and Islamophobia, she argues, are merely earlier examples. Today we have a president who creates conspiracy theories such as spreading the cruel and hateful untruth that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Ukraine, and not Putin, started the war there, that Zelensky is a dictator with only 4% of his population behind him, when the actual number is something like 57%.

Rather than make the common distinction between right and left wing (or red states and blue states) I think it makes sense to see an important distinction between closed and open-minded thinking and coming down in favor of open-mindedness because it matches the scientific method which defines truth as what we know as of the present moment and always subject to change as new information becomes available.

It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly.  If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy.  Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party.  The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?

It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.  In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.

Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?

The time it takes

That old saw that you can't teach an old dog new tricks?  It should not be taken too seriously.  At the age of 70 I went with my husband, Taku, to the Petfood Express on the corner of Telegraph and Alcatraz because he had learned they were having a dog adoption event.  We had been thinking of taking in a dog. We were not anticipating finding one quickly because we wanted to make sure to do it responsibly and we knew it would become a serious commitment.

Right off the bat, we came upon five little girl chihuahua-Jack Russell pups - born together in Manteca just weeks before - we later learned that many like to use the designation "Jack Cheese" (or Jack-Chi's) for this particular mixed breed little dog. My eyes went straight to Miki, Taku's to Bounce, and we were blown over by the reality that we were both experiencing love at first sight.

It took a couple weeks for the adoption to go through. They needed to be spayed and vaccinated and we needed to be cleared. But there we were, one day two guys looking to build a family, the next day honest-to-god daddies with two little creatures we were to nurture and love for the next thirteen (with Miki) or fourteen and a half (with Bounce) years.

And then feel as if we had been struck by lightening when they were taken from us by death.

I had been around dogs and cats all my life and was no stranger to human-animal friendships.  I once had a cat I loved dearly I had to give up when moving to Japan. I found her a good family with two kids that loved her but she died of leukemia two weeks after I left. I felt shock and terrible sadness, especially for the kids, but I managed in time to tuck the event away into the "that's life" drawer and move on. The loss of Miki and Bounce was of another order of magnitude.

When I spoke of old dogs learning of new tricks, what I was referring to was learning, at the age of 70, how important it was to find yourself in a place of responsibility for another living creature's life. Parents - the decent ones, which I take to mean nearly all of them - learn this and you don't have to look too far to find people who will tell you they would give their lives for their children. Something in the nature of creation inclines us to love those for whom we play a caretaker, life-or-death, role.  Taking those two helpless little creatures into our home and our hearts gave me new insight into the horror that is child abuse and child abandonment. How anyone could do such a thing is now virtually inconceivable to me.

I won't take on those who reject the thought that one can love an animal as one loves a child. Those of us who do don't need to convince those who don't; it's enough to know such love is widespread.  I've seen it often with dogs and cats and horses. I've seen it with birds, as well, and one of my favorite vlogs features a guy who calls himself Ruben Namibia. He grew up on a farm in Namibia with a baboon named Cindy he calls his sister.  Have a look and prepare to be delighted.

Miki came down with a disease called Cushing's Disease. We watched its progression carefully for several months before it became clear at some point that she was not going to make it.  When she went into critical distress I insisted on keeping her home with me.  I didn't want to risk letting her die among strangers by rushing her to emergency. Taku had gone to visit his mother in Japan, but our friend Bill was here when she went and his presence kept me from going off the deep end. The doubts nagged on and I had to face the possibility that I was projecting my very human fear of dying in a strange place alone, and in pain, and letting that fear drive my decision.

Her ashes were returned to us and they sit in a prominent space in our living room.  Neither Taku nor I felt the need for us to discuss the fact that we would now spoil Bounce rotten.  She would come to dictate, for the additional year and a half that she outlived her sister, almost every coming and going. We jumped to open the door when she decided she wanted out; we smiled, and never got annoyed when she would then change her mind mid-stream and not go out, only to come scratching again minutes later.  We loaded up on carpet cleaner for those moments when Bounce, now in a weakened state, would leave barf and pee stains on the carpet. We took her with us when we visited friends - and thanked the stars we had friends who showed no hesitance to welcome her in. 

Bounce had been on pain medication for arthritis for ten months, and I think one of those medications ended up doing damage to her kidneys. Taku left for Japan on the 12th of this month with considerable concern about the fact that Bounce was not feeling all that well.  She had not eaten in three days and I promised him I'd take her to the vet the next day. His mother suffers from his absence and he had to twist into knots to be given this time off, so I encouraged him to leave on schedule. I waited one more day and when our regular vet learned Bounce had not taken in any food in four days, he urged us to take her to a specialty vet for an ultrasound. That led to the revelation that she was dealing with a tumor, and the lack of desire to eat, it turns out, was from a pretty serious blockage.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish we could go over Taku's decision to travel. Bounce died two days after his departure. Twice, now, within eighteen months, Taku has gone to Japan to see his mother only to have one of his daughters die in his absence. I don't think I could conceive of a crueler irony no matter how hard I tried. The term "benefit of hindsight" is not a simple phrase having to do with the human condition; it sounds in these ears like the worst taunting of a bully I've ever known.

I want to use this space to think out loud about such things as coming to terms with the challenges of life and about the truism that grief is a mirror image of the amount of love you pour into a relationship, and about the fact that death comes to us all. I don't want to make this a pity-party for me and my doubts and the possibility that I might have made some colossally bad decisions - or the possibility that I might have made some good decisions it is still too early to recognize as such.

But I do want to acknowledge that this has been a week that strikes me as a series of events conceived, designed and produced in hell.  I am not a theist, but I do understand why so many of my fellow human creatures are able to personify good and evil as God and the Devil. I feel I've been through what in the Judeo-Christian tradition is known as "the valley of the shadow of death." It's not an exaggeration; it's a cry from the depths.

I've been a difficult person to deal with, having put several friends on hold while I nurture my pain alone, insisting on going through it, and not around it. My life experience suggests denial and wishful thinking are traps to be avoided at all costs. I've had talks with myself where I've asked myself how it is that I could face my responsibility to care for an all-loving all-vulnerable living creature by making the decision to take her life. Should I be listening to a doctor who suggests euthanasia is "the best gift you could give your loved one" that I have just met?  Should I not keep Bounce sedated and get a second opinion? Am I responding to some corner of my mind where the question of the cost of surgery lives? 

I have not yet resolved this dilemma. I am hoping the time comes - and that it comes sooner rather than later - when I can focus on my decision to avoid the risk of pain and isolation as a loving act that I should credit myself for instead of the allowing the doubt over whether I made the decision prematurely to rest at the top of my thoughts.

I am writing this with the dilemma raging full force. In time, and I think time cures all, this dilemma may be resolved. I am not inclined to accept blame and I need no pity.  I am blessed with many loving friends, many of whom are urging me to not stretch out this time of doubt.

What can I say?

I just need the time it's going to take.