January 27, 2019: My Mummy's Dead

“My Mummy's dead

I can't get it through my head
and although it's been so many years
my mummy's dead”

                    -----John Lennon “My Mummy's Dead”

My mother passed away this afternoon at the age of 89.  Like Mark Twain who came in with Haley's comet and would go out 75 years later when the comet returned, mom came in on the 27th and departed on the same day of the month.  There are patterns we must follow.

Mother was born just two days before the stock market crash of 1929, which unleashed the Great Depression. The markets by then already had begun to gyrate wildly as panic was setting in. Grandfather, being from the polish side of the family, with a wicked sense of humor, would tell mom that she had brought about the national—indeed international—calamity; that, in effect, news of her imminent arrival had sent shockwaves around the world leading to the collapse of the international house of cards. Mother, more like the German side of the family, had no sense of humor; for humor had long been surgically removed from the Brockhaus side, long lost to the Protestant-Lutheran world view that everything must be interpreted quite literally. Humor has no place in these spaces.

So mother would internalize the cryptic observation and carry the burden the rest of her life.

My mother loved music. She mastered the piano as a girl and would be encouraged by her instructor to apply to Julliard. But she didn't have the confidence. When I was a boy, mother would play the church organ at St. Johns Lutheran in Ludington while I would sit next to her on the organ's bench, occasionally adding a note or two to the composition. Mother would simply slap my hand and go on. By the time we moved south, those days were over.

As a little boy the family found itself living with my Great-Grandmother Brockhaus. Grandma Brockhaus had a piano and mother would spend hours playing, performing for me a personal concert that ranged from Chopin, Beethoven, Strauss, and Rimsky-Korsakov, to church hymns and swing music, to show tunes and polka's. It was an education.

She would sing along with the tunes that had lyrics with a voice that came from heaven. As age steals youth her voice has faded in recent years, and when I reach to remember I will take out an album by Judy Collins to find a sound that best fills my ears with mommy's voice.

Mom would disparage her talents citing her father's criticisms. I remember mom doing vocal exercises as she would prepare for a rare performance, usually at a family wedding or funeral. She would sing, on these very rare occasions, hymns like The Lord's Prayer or the Ava Maria which, like The Star-Spangled Banner are not easy compositions to perform. I found her fretting, in a state of agitation, before one such performance and asked her why. “My two biggest critics are in the audience,” she said to me, referring to my grandparents. In this family, we devour our young.

“I can't explain

so much pain
an I could never show it
my mummy's dead”

“Mama don't go

Daddy come home”