A death in the family
Mar. 7th, 2018 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olorielMy grandfather passed away yesterday afternoon.
This is only partly true. My grandfather, the man I knew as my grandfather, all but disappeared about 15 years ago. Sometimes bits of him would resurface. Not always the good ones. He could be tyrannical, belligerent and terribly stubborn. But in his good moments, he was super-proud of having great-grandchildren. He enjoyed the same jokes he had loved earlier. He was fond of parodies of the classics. Ich sei, gewährt mir die Bitte/ in eurem Skatclub der Dritte. - Sieh da, sieh da, Timotheus,/ die Ibiche des Kranikus. - Er zählt die Häupter seiner Lieben/ und sieh, es sind statt sechse sieben. - O tempora, o Moritz. That was the kind of humour he thrived on. He loved Loriot and Heinz Erhardt. Back when Jörg was introduced to him and he asked where Jörg worked, his reaction to the place - Essen-Kupferdreh - was "Oh, the part of Essen that's named after three animals! Kuh, Pferd, Reh!" He loved puns and malapropisms. In his bright moments, he read newspapers and discussed what he read in them with his sons. He was opinionated, and discussing things with him was never fun even if you agreed. But in those moments, he knew what he was saying and what was going on.
In his less bright, but still lucid moments, he wished for death. He always dreaded fading into dementia, loosing his sense of place and self and the present, and that was exactly what was happening to him; and when he noticed, he said that he hoped he would be allowed to leave this world soon.
He was thoroughly Catholic, so he was waiting for permission to leave. Those were his words. "Allowed to leave this world". "Get called home". All of his friends had gone before him, his wives had gone before him, and his siblings, too.
In his bright moments, he was nonetheless proud to have reached the age of 91 and become a great-grandfather. "Due to a kindly field surgeon," he said once - when he was already living at a nursery home because he was a danger to himself and others at home - and then, a story emerged that he had never told before. Grandpa never talked about the war, never told us stories from his youth or young adulthood, and he had never told his sons - my father and his two brothers - either. We all knew that he detested uniforms. He detested them so much that his sons weren't allowed to join the Boy Scouts, who were a big deal in their home town in their youth in the 60s. It even took my grandmother's intercession so they were at least allowed to serve as altar boys, whose red and white embroidered frocks are really as far away from any kind of 3rd Reich uniform as you can possibly get. He was an accountant, scrupulously strict, both at the workplace and at home. More than once, he must have made my grandmother cry because she had spent a few Marks somewhere and no longer knew where or what for. It wasn't about the money, it was about not knowing where it had gone. - My father will inherit less than his brothers because, due to taking his A-levels and studying medicine instead of starting training on the job, he was dependent on his parents' money for longer. A matter of principle. In the late 90s or early 00s, my grandfather bought stock shares that duly lost much of their value, and he refused to sell them and salvage what was left of the money until they had AT THE LEAST! reached their original value again. (Needless to say, they never did.) He loved classical music and had an impressive collection of CDs, and he would never listen to the same CD twice until he had listened to every other CD. I don't know whether he thought the other CDs would be jealous if they didn't all have their turn before there was a second go. But that was the sort of principle he was obsessed with.
Anyway, when Grandpa's memory went and he forgot that he didn't talk about the war, a story emerged how he had been shot through the buttocks, somewhere on the Eastern front, and a kindly medic declared him Too Ill For Transport. He missed the transport ship that his bataillon had been scheduled for, and while he was still in hospital, they heard the news that the ship had been sunk by a Soviet submarine. It was a famous ship, too, but I forgot the name. In that moment, he clearly felt that his existence now, at the age of 91, was his personal victory over the misfortunes of war. He was later taken into war captivity by the Red Army, something else that many didn't survive. He still knew the name of the town in Thuringia where it happened.
Then he regretted that it would be too hard to go there, to see what it looks like today, because of the border to the GDR.
...
Then a moment later he would talk about his expectations for the upcoming election and how it was likely that there would be another Grand Coalition, and he was in the present again, and in the mind that Did Not Talk About The War.
He was not a great man, the sort where you read the obituary and think "Wow, I wish I could have known this person". He was a doting grandfather, but he was also bossy and stubborn and selfish. I already mentioned that he drove my grandmother (who died of cancer when I was 11) to tears over the household accounts. He also drove my aunt, the wife of his middle son, to tears because she wouldn't cook the soup exactly in the way that his mother, or maybe my grandmother, did it - all the greens in huge chunks so you could easily fish out the bits you didn't like, and there had to be cauliflower in it. She had chopped up all the veggies nicely, like civilised folk do. It must have been a terrible drama. (I did not witness any of it, btw; they happened off-stage and while I was very young or before I was born.) My mother was spared from this fate because she was never an enthusiastic cook and gladly left this job to my father, who of course knew how to make soup the Only True Way.
After my grandmother died, Grandpa eventually married again, a woman he met on a bus journey, who was so comically subservient and overattentive that my cousins, my brother and I couldn't help making fun of it, but it wasn't really a joking matter. I'm sure they loved each other, but they were not good for each other; he would've needed someone who took no shit and didn't do every little thing for him. But they were happy, apparently, until she fell prey to Alzheimer's and rapidly deteriorated until she died, about 15 years ago.
My grandfather, too, deteriorated, but in his case it happened slowly, bit by bit. He was aware of it and hated it. He wanted to be "called home". He found it hard to live alone, or even alone and supported by a domestic nursing service and cleaning lady. At the same time, he refused to move to assisted accomodation or a retirement home because "there's only old people there". When he was finally convinced to try out assisted living, he drew back because "nobody's talking to me". So he stayed in his house until a few years ago, when he started to walk out at night and leave the door open and smashed furniture and it was clear that he couldn't stay unsupervised, nor in a regular old people's home. He moved into a nursing home close to his youngest son, whose relationship to his father was the least strained at the time. We visited once or twice a year, and generally saw each other for his birthday and Christmas. He was, as I said, very proud to have great-grandchildren, although he never managed to learn their names. But he observed how Julian looked just like my brother as a baby, while Felix had a completely different face (he takes after Jörg). The picture on the door of his room, where all the patients get to choose an individual photo, was one of my boys.
We knew that it was going to happen one of these days. In January, shortly before my father's birthday, he had a flare of confused aggression and demolished his room at the nursing home. They tried to adjust his meds, but he only grew more and more confused. He spent most of the day sleeping - which at least made him less dangerous to himself and others. Initially, he still noticed and sometimes recognised my father or his brothers when they visited (or knew it was one of his sons, anyway); then he noticed that someone was visiting, but not who. "We can only hope", my father said, and I didn't dare ask whether he meant hope for a miracle or hope for the end. Anyway, the end has come, and I'm almost surprised that I am crying.
Because the truth is, we didn't really have much to do with each other anymore, and what relationship there was, was purely based on duty, because family ties. Not the happy kind of family ties. My father's brothers, who saw him more often, were stressed out every time.
BUT of course I never said goodbye when he began to drift into dementia. It was a progress, and as such, kept on going on. Now that he has died, it has stopped; and so I have to confront the long, slow farewell. I cried when I got the news, and Jörg observed that it seemed to really shake me. But it is not the devastating sense of loss that I felt when either of my grandmothers died. It's just the finality that hurts. Saying goodbye always hurts. Telling Felix will hurt, not because he was any closer to Grandpa than the rest of us, but because of what it is. (Julian, who was still awake when I got the call, just asked: "So Great-grandpa is not in hospital anymore?" That's one way of putting it, sweetie.) But beyond that hurt, there is relief rather than grief. When Grandpa said that he wanted to leave this world, we would always dutifully go "Aww, don't say that", but I know that I secretly thought, and I suspect that his sons also secretly felt, that he was right. He did not enjoy most of the past (at least) ten years and outright hated much of them.
So now he was, at last, "called home". Whether that's upstairs or downstairs, well, that's fortunately not for me to figure out.
This is only partly true. My grandfather, the man I knew as my grandfather, all but disappeared about 15 years ago. Sometimes bits of him would resurface. Not always the good ones. He could be tyrannical, belligerent and terribly stubborn. But in his good moments, he was super-proud of having great-grandchildren. He enjoyed the same jokes he had loved earlier. He was fond of parodies of the classics. Ich sei, gewährt mir die Bitte/ in eurem Skatclub der Dritte. - Sieh da, sieh da, Timotheus,/ die Ibiche des Kranikus. - Er zählt die Häupter seiner Lieben/ und sieh, es sind statt sechse sieben. - O tempora, o Moritz. That was the kind of humour he thrived on. He loved Loriot and Heinz Erhardt. Back when Jörg was introduced to him and he asked where Jörg worked, his reaction to the place - Essen-Kupferdreh - was "Oh, the part of Essen that's named after three animals! Kuh, Pferd, Reh!" He loved puns and malapropisms. In his bright moments, he read newspapers and discussed what he read in them with his sons. He was opinionated, and discussing things with him was never fun even if you agreed. But in those moments, he knew what he was saying and what was going on.
In his less bright, but still lucid moments, he wished for death. He always dreaded fading into dementia, loosing his sense of place and self and the present, and that was exactly what was happening to him; and when he noticed, he said that he hoped he would be allowed to leave this world soon.
He was thoroughly Catholic, so he was waiting for permission to leave. Those were his words. "Allowed to leave this world". "Get called home". All of his friends had gone before him, his wives had gone before him, and his siblings, too.
In his bright moments, he was nonetheless proud to have reached the age of 91 and become a great-grandfather. "Due to a kindly field surgeon," he said once - when he was already living at a nursery home because he was a danger to himself and others at home - and then, a story emerged that he had never told before. Grandpa never talked about the war, never told us stories from his youth or young adulthood, and he had never told his sons - my father and his two brothers - either. We all knew that he detested uniforms. He detested them so much that his sons weren't allowed to join the Boy Scouts, who were a big deal in their home town in their youth in the 60s. It even took my grandmother's intercession so they were at least allowed to serve as altar boys, whose red and white embroidered frocks are really as far away from any kind of 3rd Reich uniform as you can possibly get. He was an accountant, scrupulously strict, both at the workplace and at home. More than once, he must have made my grandmother cry because she had spent a few Marks somewhere and no longer knew where or what for. It wasn't about the money, it was about not knowing where it had gone. - My father will inherit less than his brothers because, due to taking his A-levels and studying medicine instead of starting training on the job, he was dependent on his parents' money for longer. A matter of principle. In the late 90s or early 00s, my grandfather bought stock shares that duly lost much of their value, and he refused to sell them and salvage what was left of the money until they had AT THE LEAST! reached their original value again. (Needless to say, they never did.) He loved classical music and had an impressive collection of CDs, and he would never listen to the same CD twice until he had listened to every other CD. I don't know whether he thought the other CDs would be jealous if they didn't all have their turn before there was a second go. But that was the sort of principle he was obsessed with.
Anyway, when Grandpa's memory went and he forgot that he didn't talk about the war, a story emerged how he had been shot through the buttocks, somewhere on the Eastern front, and a kindly medic declared him Too Ill For Transport. He missed the transport ship that his bataillon had been scheduled for, and while he was still in hospital, they heard the news that the ship had been sunk by a Soviet submarine. It was a famous ship, too, but I forgot the name. In that moment, he clearly felt that his existence now, at the age of 91, was his personal victory over the misfortunes of war. He was later taken into war captivity by the Red Army, something else that many didn't survive. He still knew the name of the town in Thuringia where it happened.
Then he regretted that it would be too hard to go there, to see what it looks like today, because of the border to the GDR.
...
Then a moment later he would talk about his expectations for the upcoming election and how it was likely that there would be another Grand Coalition, and he was in the present again, and in the mind that Did Not Talk About The War.
He was not a great man, the sort where you read the obituary and think "Wow, I wish I could have known this person". He was a doting grandfather, but he was also bossy and stubborn and selfish. I already mentioned that he drove my grandmother (who died of cancer when I was 11) to tears over the household accounts. He also drove my aunt, the wife of his middle son, to tears because she wouldn't cook the soup exactly in the way that his mother, or maybe my grandmother, did it - all the greens in huge chunks so you could easily fish out the bits you didn't like, and there had to be cauliflower in it. She had chopped up all the veggies nicely, like civilised folk do. It must have been a terrible drama. (I did not witness any of it, btw; they happened off-stage and while I was very young or before I was born.) My mother was spared from this fate because she was never an enthusiastic cook and gladly left this job to my father, who of course knew how to make soup the Only True Way.
After my grandmother died, Grandpa eventually married again, a woman he met on a bus journey, who was so comically subservient and overattentive that my cousins, my brother and I couldn't help making fun of it, but it wasn't really a joking matter. I'm sure they loved each other, but they were not good for each other; he would've needed someone who took no shit and didn't do every little thing for him. But they were happy, apparently, until she fell prey to Alzheimer's and rapidly deteriorated until she died, about 15 years ago.
My grandfather, too, deteriorated, but in his case it happened slowly, bit by bit. He was aware of it and hated it. He wanted to be "called home". He found it hard to live alone, or even alone and supported by a domestic nursing service and cleaning lady. At the same time, he refused to move to assisted accomodation or a retirement home because "there's only old people there". When he was finally convinced to try out assisted living, he drew back because "nobody's talking to me". So he stayed in his house until a few years ago, when he started to walk out at night and leave the door open and smashed furniture and it was clear that he couldn't stay unsupervised, nor in a regular old people's home. He moved into a nursing home close to his youngest son, whose relationship to his father was the least strained at the time. We visited once or twice a year, and generally saw each other for his birthday and Christmas. He was, as I said, very proud to have great-grandchildren, although he never managed to learn their names. But he observed how Julian looked just like my brother as a baby, while Felix had a completely different face (he takes after Jörg). The picture on the door of his room, where all the patients get to choose an individual photo, was one of my boys.
We knew that it was going to happen one of these days. In January, shortly before my father's birthday, he had a flare of confused aggression and demolished his room at the nursing home. They tried to adjust his meds, but he only grew more and more confused. He spent most of the day sleeping - which at least made him less dangerous to himself and others. Initially, he still noticed and sometimes recognised my father or his brothers when they visited (or knew it was one of his sons, anyway); then he noticed that someone was visiting, but not who. "We can only hope", my father said, and I didn't dare ask whether he meant hope for a miracle or hope for the end. Anyway, the end has come, and I'm almost surprised that I am crying.
Because the truth is, we didn't really have much to do with each other anymore, and what relationship there was, was purely based on duty, because family ties. Not the happy kind of family ties. My father's brothers, who saw him more often, were stressed out every time.
BUT of course I never said goodbye when he began to drift into dementia. It was a progress, and as such, kept on going on. Now that he has died, it has stopped; and so I have to confront the long, slow farewell. I cried when I got the news, and Jörg observed that it seemed to really shake me. But it is not the devastating sense of loss that I felt when either of my grandmothers died. It's just the finality that hurts. Saying goodbye always hurts. Telling Felix will hurt, not because he was any closer to Grandpa than the rest of us, but because of what it is. (Julian, who was still awake when I got the call, just asked: "So Great-grandpa is not in hospital anymore?" That's one way of putting it, sweetie.) But beyond that hurt, there is relief rather than grief. When Grandpa said that he wanted to leave this world, we would always dutifully go "Aww, don't say that", but I know that I secretly thought, and I suspect that his sons also secretly felt, that he was right. He did not enjoy most of the past (at least) ten years and outright hated much of them.
So now he was, at last, "called home". Whether that's upstairs or downstairs, well, that's fortunately not for me to figure out.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-07 01:54 pm (UTC)Anyone who does not fear ending one's life in a state of dementia has never seen a loved one lose that battle.
My heart goes out to you. Please accept my sincerest condolences to you and your family.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 09:20 am (UTC)There will be ringing accolades at the funeral, no doubt, but it's just more complicated in real life, isn't it. Yes, he was a man of his times, and it's frustrating to see how much of that luggage still sticks to the following generations. I do hope our sons will grow into a different world. Right now, I'm not too optimistic. Society seems to be moving backwards right now. (Felix has now reached an age where he's picking up clues like "butterflies are for girls". So we're having discussions about how some people think that boys shouldn't like soft or cute or pretty things, but how that's stupid...)
Probably. Though I have honestly never met anyone who wasn't terrified of the idea. The closest I've come was an article (concerning assisted suicide) where the author wondered how to draw the line, how she could know now how she'd feel in the hopefully distant future, how perhaps she would actually feel quite happy even when unconscious or in a different state of consciousness, so it was hard to determine whether she'd want to die then or not. Fair points, but it's all rather academic...
Thank you again.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-07 02:00 pm (UTC)My condolences to you and yours.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 09:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-07 03:07 pm (UTC)--Yes, I know exactly what you mean. *hugs gently*
My deepest sympathy and condolences to you and your entire family.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 09:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-07 03:10 pm (UTC)How lucky for your grandfather to have been Too Ill To Transport! (I wonder if it felt like luck at the time?)
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 09:03 am (UTC)As you say, it's been a long process of loss, and there was no good or graceful way of saying goodbye. That's the part that hurts.
I think it did. From what I understood, he was actually on the mend and could have joined the transport lying if not sitting. I don't know whether the medic was acting on impulse or whether my grandfather asked him to write that on the report, but either way, it appears to have been a favour, and I think Grandpa did appreciate it even at the time. (He was thoroughly sick of the war but not sick of life, back then.)
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 10:53 pm (UTC)My grandmother used to call it "Heaven Express", when she said she was waiting for it to come and fetch her away...
no subject
Date: 2018-03-09 01:20 pm (UTC)Heh. That's a journey image I only knew from an Astrid Lindgren book so far.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 08:09 pm (UTC)I should probably leave it there. I'm told that my style of sympathy, of sharing an anecdote of something similar which happened in my life, is not actually widely appreciated. So if you share that opinion, stop reading at this paragraph, and just know that I'm thinking about you, and sympathising, and hoping for the best.
My grandmother died of complications of Alzheimer's disease. I hated watching this marvelous, caring woman (who once told me that she didn't like Peter Gabriel because she hated the animal abuse in "Shock the Monkey") slowly slip away from us.
When she died, I felt... relieved. That she didn't have to ride that elevator all the way down. That she was, if the faith in which I was raised has any roots in truth, in a better, happier place. That the whole ordeal was over.
It sucks to feel that way about the death of a loved one. But it's also a genuine reaction.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-11 10:40 am (UTC)Grandpa did take the elevator pretty far down, and it was awful to watch and, from what he said, awful to go through also. But being relieved about the death of a human being, let alone a family member, always feels wrong - even if there are reasons why it actually (very likely?) was a relief. >_>
Thank you for your sympathy and thoughts.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 01:14 pm (UTC)I took me a while to read through your beautiful tribute; I had to stop a couple of times as it evoked painful memories, although it also gave me comfort to revisit them. I can fully relate to the mixed feelings of grief and relief when a close person in such a situation goes. I've been there, too, and I know the feeling well that the person we once knew wasn't really there anymore. I think our grief comes from finally having to accept that, of giving up the futile hope that things might change back, and also of finally being allowed to grieve about the loss. The gradual process of dementia makes it so very difficult to live with it, I think, but also the fact that you never could really say goodbye. *hugs again*
no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 07:48 pm (UTC)Thank you for your thoughts, and I'm very sorry to have evoked painful memories, even if there was some comfort in them as well. *hugs*