
I am convinced that our presence here on earth is accidental. Our existence is no more rational or irrational than that of the squirrel in our back-yard, the cow that gives us our milk or the man-eating shark in the ocean. There is no point to our existence and we share this "pointlessness" with all other beings including plants, amoebas and jelly-fish. If we ask "why do we exist," all we hear back is silence. Unless we attempt to answer the question ourselves. Then we hear what we think, what we hope, what we yearn to be true. But the fact remains that there is no point to our birth (other than that it brings us into the world) and there is no point to our death (when we're taken out of the world again).
My grandmother is dying. The pictures my father sent of her lying in her bed are reminiscent of the ones of my grandfather, from just nine months ago, after he had died. The only difference is she is still breathing. But she says she wants to die, in peace. So what was the point exactly, of her life? Born in 1918, she grew up in Hamburg, married my grandfather at the tender age of 20. She brought three children into the world. Her youngest, my uncle Hans-Joern, almost died as an infant. She brought those three from East-Prussia to Hamburg, just hours before Russian tanks reached their town in East-Prussia. She waited for my grandfather, first to return from the war and then to return from being a prisoner of war.
She was 43 when I, her first grandchild, was born. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' home. First in their rented apartment in Meiendorf (where I remember my grandmother lugging "brikets" (coal) in metal buckets up the stairs. She wore a pink bath-robe and old worn slippers. I remember the "Butze", a small cove-like bed, built into the wall. It had a curtain that could be drawn for complete privacy. There I would sleep. There my grandmother would sit by my bed-side and sing lullabys for me. "Der Mond ist aufgegangen" was and is one of my favorite song. I still sing it for my boys. And I still remember her voice, much different from that of my mom, and her fingers, tenderly touching my back. But what is the point?
She had raised her three children and, one by one, grandchildren came along, first I, then my cousin Kai, then my sister Katja, followed by my cousins Michael and Anja. While we were growing up she and my grandfather had moved to a different part of Hamburg where, again, they rented a small apartment, on the fourth floor of a multi-family building. This apartment would be my grandmother's home for the next 45 years. There she and my grandfather lived, fought, and, I hope, also loved every once in a while. This tiny apartment became the meeting place for children and grandchildren. Uncounted are the family dinners we had there, crunched together around the dinner-table, 12 people, and later girl-friends also attended. I love remembering those times, my grandmother's Zitronenspeise, a kind of lemon mousse, my cousin Anja's ballet performances, my aunt Uschi's funny family rhymes, all the serious discussions about politics we had in that place. For me, though, those times ended when I left Germany in 1985 and settled in the US. In spirit I was still present at every family gathering that followed, but I missed most of them.
Uncounted are the letters my grandmother wrote to me, and I to her. Hers always included a bit of "Knete" (dough), usually $20. Nothing ever got lost, a small miracle. When phone calls across the Atlantic became more affordable we would call each other often. In the last few years, we spoke almost every week. Her hearing was getting increasingly worse. But we managed and every conversation ended with me saying "Ich hab' Dich lieb, Oma" (I love you, Oma) and she would say "Ich Dich auch, das kannst Du wohl sagen" (I love you too, that's for sure). The last time I heard those words was only a week ago, with her voice being quite weak and scratchy sounding. We didn't speak for more than two minutes. For the first time I thought she was right, she would die soon; because this what she had predicted since about the time she was 40. Yes, next to being an unbelievably tender grandmother, nurturing and caring for her grandchildren, she was also depressed for most of her life. But she lived, strongly, in spite of it, in spite, also, of her breast-cancer and partial mastectomy in 1977, at 59. But what is all this about? Why is this important?
In 1996, when my son Noah was born, my grandmother became a great-grandmother for the first time and by 2006 she had nine great-grandchildren. It makes me unspeakably happy to know that she has met all three of my boys. "Uroma" is a real person to them. They recognize her in pictures and know her voice. She spoiled them as she spoiled me with candy (when we were there) and with money when we could be with each other.
Now my grandmother is dying and I am left wondering what the point of all of this was and is. Why remember, why recount? In a world where our existence is accidental it is very hard to discern anything else but an immanent purpose for those activities. If our existence is truly accidental the question "why we live" becomes moot. I believe that remembering and recounting are intensely pleasurable. Meaning-making is what we humans do. It is no different from squirrels eating nuts. Squirrels eat nuts to promote the species. Humans make meaning to do exactly that too. The beauty I see in my grandmother and in her life, the awe I feel before a life lived so well makes me replete with feelings. They increase my wish to live also. Just to live, to be happy and to pay much attention to happiness in the very mundane minutes of my life. My ability to do so, much of it I learned from her, I hope I can also pass on to my children. The will to live and happiness are intimately connected. But happiness is "now", not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. So I give myself permission to be happy, right now, as I think of my grandmother and bringing her life and what I know of it into the now.
My greatest wish would be to sit by her bed-side and sing her a lullaby. It is to tell her it's okay to let go, just as it was for me to fall asleep. That wish will remain unfulfilled. But in the now I can also remember that only in March she and I were cuddling together on the couch in her tiny apartment. She felt like a tiny fragile bird to me, I like a giant next to her. And we were happy to know the meaning of that moment, together.
2 comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xn5riC430w&feature=related
Utterly beautiful and deep yet simple....very helpful as I struggle to hold on to life; to convince myself to look for any reason to live.
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