My father sold my parents’ apartment and moved out 2 weeks ago. This key is/was the key to my parents’s home. And it officially symbolized the last real connection to the past that includes my mom.
You see, I keep thinking her death hasn’t really hit me yet because I haven’t had those major life events yet – I haven’t gotten married yet, and I haven’t had children yet.
But you know? Major life events don’t really matter – those are usually events that last a day or two and then you settle into your new life.
For all intents and purposes, this is a new life. I am living with a man that my mother never met, in an apartment she’s never seen, in a city she never thought I’d live in (ditto, by the way), working at a company she never heard of, and driving a car she’s never been in.
And now – visiting my father will be in a new place, completely void of memories related to my mom.
There are few things in my life now that are consistent with what my life was like the last time my mom was aware of my existence. In essence, just my family. And this is what it’s going to be from now on.
Because I will continue living with a man she’ll never meet, in apartments she’ll never see, in cities she won’t visit, working at companies she will not hear of, and driving cars she’ll never be in.
Except I’ll also be marrying a man she’ll never meet, having kids she’ll never see, who will miss out on the amazing mother and grandmother that she was.
So really, later is now.
August 7, 2010 at 1:07 pm
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August 8, 2010 at 11:54 am
I so much feel for you, not just because I have been moved and enriched by reading your posts about your mother and the time before and since her death, but because I grew up without grandparents, three of whose lives were ended brutally and prematurely by the Nazis, as well as those of a beloved uncle and endless numbers of great aunts and uncles and cousins.
I particularly felt and still feel great regret that I never got a chance to meet them, most of all my mum’s parents and my dad’s mum, after whom I named my daughter.
But the lives and personalities of my mother’s parents were almost as real to me as if they had been alive, thanks to the stories my mother constantly told me of them, and of course through the wonderful food we had all through my childhood, all of which was from my grandmother’s methods and recipes which my mother learnt and served up, always perfectly, without a single written recipe.
So successful was my mother in evoking their presence and their loving care in me, that I seriously thought as a kid that their souls were living in our cat, who watched over me so benignly and so unjudgementally, and was always my loving friend and companion when I had none.
When I was 18, I met my surviving great uncle, my grandfather’s brother when I spent six months in Israel, and it was a great joy to meet him and see in person what a wonderful couple he and his wife were throughout the six months, and even experience their Seder.
That gave me a taste of what that generation of my mother’s family was like–a fantastic experience which I treasure to this day and made me feel as near as I could have been to being in the company of my grandparents. I gave my daughter my late great aunt’s name as an additional name in loving memory of her.
And also at that time I met various refugee and Holocaust survivor relatives who told me stories of these wonderful meals they’d had at my grandmother’s table, over sixty years previously when they were passing through Berlin on their way to the USA or on aliyah.
So I think, Talia, that if you are blessed with children, and I hope you will be, your mother and her life and gifts will be as vivid to them as my grandparents are to me through your own wonderful gift of making her live for all of us through the stories you’ve told and tell in your blog. But you will have many thousands more of much smaller and apparently trivial and not-for-sharing outside family stories that they will also hear and love, and ask for time and time again.
That will be one of the many great gifts you will be able to offer them, that will be worth much more to them through life then gold and rubies.
August 8, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Talia,
I just found you blog and reading these posts was a very emotional experience. I lost my grandfather to lung cancer when I was 9. Although we were really close, I didn’t realize what exactly it meant that he was gone forever until I moved from Bulgaria to the USA. After I checked in for my flight I felt so sad, not only because I was leaving my entire family and life as I knew it, but also because my grandfather wasn’t there to say goodbay. He wasn’t there to give me a warm hug and wish me well. Throughout the years there have been so many moments when I wished he was alive so I could share these moments with him.
I, just like Judy, ask my father to tell me stories about my grandfather. I even ask him what he would have said in certain situations and it helps me feel better. It makes me feel closer to him, although it was never the same.
In the past several months, I’ve been a part of project that gives hope to cancer patients and their families. I think that we, the family members, need more hope than the cancer patients. Although they are the ones who suffer the pain, we are the ones left with a huge hole in our lives forever. Check out http://stateofthearthope.com/hopeis/ . I hope it makes you feel better for a few minutes.
Again, thank you for sharing your story and verbalizing what so many feel, but don’t know how to express.
Addy