The three of us at the grave. With the mortician, who slowly and uncertainly lets the urn slide into the small hole. There is no mourning.
Why should I mourn a man I didn’t even know? We were rather cheerful in the chapel beforehand. Even laughed briefly beforehand. Only the brief moment of silence in the dark rotunda, slightly lit by a few candles, interrupts the supposedly cheerful mood. Just this moment. Disbelieving looks from the mortician.
Why does this thought of the time of loss creep up on me today? Of a father who said to his older brother that he wanted nothing to do with the youngest, i.e. with me.
I haven’t had anything to do with him since Christmas 1970. He gave me his farewell present with the metal cars in the artist’s studio, above the passageway to the courtyards. 24 years before I ran after him on the way to the grave. The semi-trailer truck set was one of my favorite toys for a long time. They were stage trucks for the bands that I only got to see live many years later. They were involved in road construction on the stretch floor of the ex-building in the children’s room. Or transported the first Matchbox cars paid for with Ostmark through the rooms of the three-room new-build apartment. In my imagination, I sat at the wheel and maneuvered the miniaturized 40-ton trucks with ease. Never a thought about the person who gave it away.
No longing for the man who has passed away. There is only the memory of this pre-Christmas evening in the small hometown. Of this tall man with his officer’s uniform, who called a soldier back to salute at the main station. No memory of how long we spent together with the much older siblings and him. Our mother had rented the room for us through the Kulturbund. A large room, brightly lit, like a seminar room, with the usual Sprelacart furniture. But that wasn’t important. I only had eyes for my trucks. No memories of conversations. Just like the years we must have spent together here in my parents‘ apartment sometime between 1964 and 1966. Only this gift evening and the previous summer vacation week with him in Magdeburg are stored in my memories.
The summer of 1970, a week with my brother and sister at our father’s house. A dark three-room apartment in an old building. Big for me back then. We had space to play with the historic cavalry gun carriage and build stalls in the hallway. Driving through the new district capital on a tourist bus in a converted Barkas with trailers. And the fish stew of choice at the Gastmahl des Meeres. I didn’t like fish back then. I was tricked because I wasn’t due to start school to learn to read and write until September 1st. Not much more remains of that vacation, while my mother married her new husband by her side and spent the honeymoon, tucked away on my shelf of thoughts. A lovingly designed black and white photo album refreshes these fragments from time to time.
My father was not spoken to at home. My brother and sister secretly kept in touch with him by letter. At the time, I was not aware of how they received their replies. Until the day our mother found a letter from my sister to my father. Bitter words about family life with the new boy. Grounding, arguments and favoritism towards the seven years younger brother were the information that was supposed to reach the father, but was exorcized by the mother with a house gossip on the back of the older sister. Formative for her and for me as an observer. Big brother had already moved out. As I found out later, the relationship between mother, son and father was the driving force behind the boarding school for apprentices.
I always looked up to my siblings and actually wanted to be like them. Jimi Hendrix, Uschi Brüning, the Beatles, the club room we set up ourselves for the clique … that was cool. And yet we never got together. Until today. The little one was favored. He had a better life. He was spoiled and conformed to the patchwork parents.
His brother and sister never talked about his father either. Not until this bright sunny day in Pritzwalk. In front of the party hall. First jokes about the one we all called „father“. No emotions. The tall one took care of everything and has also organized the grave care to this day. He had the closest contact with his father. He visited him several times a year and probably knew him best. Perhaps he was closest to him. But he didn’t feel any emotional emotion that made him feel sad. What kind of relationship was that? What led to the three of us watching the ashes being moved to the grave without respect for our dead father? Saying goodbye to a stranger with a genetic match in the cemetery of his ancestors. Grandfather, grandmother, war-lost uncle in the immediate vicinity of the freshly dug hole. A place of remembrance that I tried to visit once a year on my way to a vacation at the Baltic Sea and to remember with a cheap bouquet of gas station flowers. A sense of duty? Because that’s what you do? What rule applies here? No sense of sadness even then. Perhaps only the thought that it is a person like any other who has found his „final“ resting place right here in Pritzwalk.
What remains apart from the gleaming urn grave cover of a person who can be called his father? Perhaps the wooden flail that survived the fourth move? Or the sadness over the loss of the transistor radio from his neglected last apartment in Frauenwald, Thuringia, where he had to endure his deportation as janitor in the former NVA vacation home and died alone of lung cancer alongside a mongrel dog? Perhaps the anger that I myself made no effort after my parents became independent, despite my brother’s refusal to make contact with my father? Could it be that the turning point and my own fear for my personal future or the separation from my own family, my two beloved daughters, led to the repression of the existence of my own father? Is it also possible that I found the new family constellation with mother and daddy satisfactory for my development until the fall of communism? Isn’t it too tedious today to fabulate about the reasons for forgetting?
No, because what will remain of me? Will my daughters, whom I abandoned after separating from their mother, just like my father abandoned me, laugh at my grave? Relieved that he is finally dead. The person who showed little interest in their experience of life, how they were doing at nursery, school, training or university. Who wasn’t there when they had their first heartbreak. Who didn’t have to endure puberty as a buffer and the first outcry of independence in the minds and actions of the two girls. Living with this damage to this day, I wonder what memories will remain with my sisters after my death. Or is it not even selfish of me to expect my beloved daughters to shed a single tear over the loss of their father?
So why these thoughts? I had felt nothing when I saw the urn laid out in the round hall in Pritzwalk, in the hands of the mortician and disappearing into the ground. No grief. No loss. And yet an obligation to deal with it, because it was the death of my father that reminded me of the finite nature of my life.
Do it differently? I know the responsibility to my son from my current marriage. Pre-life. Always keeping in mind what defines our humanity. Empathy and prudence towards life. This also includes the fact that people I love and trust will leave me or I will leave them. They start new families, make new friends, move house, change jobs deliberately or by force, lose loved ones or die. Many things change in the course of life. If I lose the time to mourn the loss, a piece of my own self disappears into a cloud of oblivion.
That’s why I’m remembering my father’s death today.
Background
The second book in the #nichtgesellschaftsfähig series „Death, loss, grief and life“ was published on August 23, 2022. Sandra Strauß and Schwarwel have once again published a 600-page anthology with texts that deal with a topic that is seemingly not socially acceptable. This text was written for this book.
We encounter death every day. Sometimes we are aware of it because it takes loved ones or living beings from our immediate surroundings. Then again, people don’t want to deal with it because life around them is supposed to be colorful, uncomplicated, adventurous and fun-filled. Death doesn’t fit in. And yet we also encounter the octopus of the end of life in this fun-driven superficiality of humanly degenerate existence. We consume thrillers, agent blockbusters and computer games in which people die or are actively killed by us with relish. From our sacred television armchairs, we cry out for weapons for war zones in which people face each other and murder each other for our prosperity, far from the peace and quiet of home. With a controlled sense of satisfaction, we donate smaller and larger amounts of tax savings every Christmas to the starving eyes of children or to the animal shelters of this world in order to cleanse our souls.
Death must be discussed. It will not let go of us all, it has such a firm grip on us that it is not we, but it that decides when we will leave the stage of life. We need the time to prepare ourselves for this time of life, to realize that we have lived. For ourselves, for our families and friends, for our neighbors and also for those beyond us, including those who do not come from our supposed cultural circle. Because we are all human beings with a limited window of time in this world.
Sandra Strauß and Schwarwel (ed.)
„NON-SOCIAL DEATH, LOSS, Grief and LIFE“
Over 80 authors
Over 600 photos, illustrations, comics, graphic novels, cartoons, caricatures and pictures
652 pages
Ami format (17 x 24 cm)
Softcover, full color
RELEASE DATE: 23.08.2022
Happy Monday
RETAIL PRICE: 34,90 EUR
ISBN: 978-3-948518-10-3
This and other parts of the „not socially acceptable“ series are available in the Glücklicher Montag store: https://www.gluecklicher-montag-shop.de/product-category/nichtgesellschaftsfaehig