A friend of mine, now approaching his 80s, just lost a friend of fifty years who was 88. I sent him that standard but woefully inadequate ¨Sorry for your loss¨ message. When death comes lofty language is easily mistaken for insincerity, so experience teaches us to settle for silence, and hope that those suffering loss will understand that this is a time when less equals more.
This friend of mine responded with a wonderful history of his fifty years of relationship with the deceased, essentially turning the death into an opportunity to count his blessings. Now that I have reached an age where death is routine, I have a keen respect for such skill. It becomes evident that there is more than ¨sorry for your loss¨that one can say.
One can of course retreat to the reminder that grief is invariably a reflection of love and affection. At least that has been my experience - that the greater the love the greater the grief. But that doesn't guarantee that grief will be any easier to process.
I was raised in a German family, largely by a German grandmother named Bertha who mistook me for a prince. Everybody should be so lucky. Her affection gave me the confidence all children should be granted to go out into the world unafraid and prepared for the slings and arrows and the hostility we all have to face. I have been the beneficiary of not just a mother's love, but the love of aunts and grandmothers - plural - as well. I got more than a fair allotment; in addition to my grandmother - meine Großmutter, I got to establish a close relationship with Großmutter's sister-in-law, my great aunt Frieda, when I established a second home in Berlin. Frieda and her life-partner went through life as the German equivalent of John Smith and Mary Jones. He was Otto Schmidt and she was Frieda Müller. Special people despite their "ordinary" names.
I'm going on about Tante Frieda because today is her birthday. She died back in the early 1980s at the age of 94, so you can't say she didn't live a full life. How happy it was is another question. She lived through the Second World War in Berlin, forced to work through the night and the bombing because her work as a pharmacist made her too valuable to be given time off. Because she refused to join the Nazi party she had to work nights, as well, as a guard in a bomb shelter, and crawling from one bombed-out shelter to the next in the pitch black one night she fell and suffered from a loss of hearing as a result.
She looked back on those days with remarkable equanimity. The one and only time I saw her vulnerable was when we were having coffee at a cafe on the top floor of the KaDeWe Department store in downtown West Berlin and had to endure the roar of Russian planes flying by close enough that you could see the pilots. Soviet/Western Power hostility had been ongoing since the Soviet Blockade of West Berlin had resulted in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9 and the Russians were protesting the latest quarrel - if I remember right, it was the decision of the Bundestag to hold a session in Berlin.
"Take me out of here," she said, and as we finished our Kaffee und Kuchen at home I got her to talk about her war experiences for the first time ever. My admiration for her powers of endurance, already high, went through the roof.
I googled "Frieda Müller" Sachsenwaldstraße - her address - just now on the wildly improbable chance something about her might show up. What did come up was another "Mary Jones," Gertrud this time instead of Frieda, living in the same Steglitz district of Berlin, a woman born around the same time as Tante Frieda, who was deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt in 1943 before being transferred to Auschwitz and murdered a year later. An unknown grandmother worth remembering for a far more earnest reason.
Gertrud's name appears on a "stumbling block" (Stolperstein) - one of those more than 100,000 brass plates now memorializing the victims of the Nazis that have been placed around the country to mark the residences of the victims carried away in the Holocaust.
I'm reminded of Jesus and the thieves on a cross in Monty Python's Life of Brian singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," that wonderful satire of the the pollyanna "Today shalt Thou be with me in Paradise" insistence on avoiding the harsh realities of life - death, for example. But I have to admit there are multiple ways of processing grief and remembering the good parts while downplaying the not-so-good parts. That's the mood I'm in today, thinking back on my grandmother's practice of sneaking a shot of Liebfraumilch - we kept it a secret from my mother - when I would come home from school and celebrate a good test result. And on the insistence that the grandmothers of the Holocaust, like Gertrud, not be forgotten. And on the good fortune Tante Frieda, one of the cheeriest people I have ever known, experienced of making it through the war more-or-less in one piece.
I don't want to "sum things up" by pretending we can will ourselves to focus on the bright side of things. And I don't want to downplay the difference between the two grandmothers who loomed large in in my personal life and the unknown victim of the Holocaust who died in the most grotesque of circumstances when I was only four years old.
But I also don't want to miss a chance to celebrate the richness of lives lived to the fullest while remembering our commitment to never letting the authoritarians ever ready to take advantage of our limitations to keep us from that goal.
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