Two weeks.
***
It is shocking to see how wide a difference two weeks’ passing of time can make. Two weeks and three days after she took her last feeble breaths, our mother’s presence has sunk to the bottom. Processed into memory. Gone for good. No use in making that mental note to ask her about some gardening detail. No need of those mealtime trips to the home, making sure the blind woman would find her food on the plate. The chapter is closed, a next one about to be opened.
***
She died the same way she lived. Modestly. Unassuming. Never sentimental. Quietly going about her own business while the others were busy with theirs. Totally exhausted, helped with a shot, she fell asleep at nine in the evening, and while we were chatting about at her bedside, she passed on. There was no drama, no sobbing good-bye, no last words. 104 years and two and a half months of life left her without us noticing the precise moment.
***
I cannot say that I felt particularly close to her when I was young. Of course she was a good mother to us as young kids, what with over and over relating Grimm’s fairy tales, the uncensored versions, listening to the day’s worries and the night’s scares, knowing when to let things slip and when to say no. Only in later years I appreciated her as a personality, as the embodiment of a way of life, and also the living chronicle of a long-gone age in our neck of the woods. There was not a family member or a villager born between World War I and World War II she wouldn’t remember by name, birthplace, kin and trade. If you needed to know this distant cousin’s name or that one’s spouse, she was the source to go to.
***
Our mother was one hell of a strong woman and a last witness to a world once normal and now vanished, never to be replicated again. Born 1919 in the wake of a world war (the first) and dying at the dawn of perhaps another one, she saw the arrival of the telephone, the radio, the automobile, the deprivations of another world war (modest in untouched Switzerland, but noticeable on the dinner table), television, the Zeppelin blimp, the airplane, the moon landing, the computer, the mobile phone and the internet, the latter three not put to her use. She did not dwell on these when talking about the past which she did a lot after about age 95. Neither did her 55-year-marriage take center stage in these tales, nor her husband, or we kids. What she talked about was her childhood and youth in Oeschenbach, a town of 300 souls on the edge of the Emmental region. She talked about her work as a traveling seamstress, about customers who were stingy with food (in one place, she was fed a cat – she said it was quite good), and those generous with tips. She talked about how the war thwarted her plan to join a friend as an au-pair in England, and even more about the “Verdingkinder” in her class – kids from broken homes which Swiss town authorities basically rented out to farmers who took them in as foster cares and cheap labor, using and sometimes abusing them. One Xaver was often a subject of our mother’s tales. The poor lad had to provide an extra summer of free farm labor after his eight years of school on account for making up the expenses of the new suit he got for “confirmation”, the formal acceptance into the state protestant church. Some farmers, not all, our mother said, were schinthüng – “flogging dogs.”
***
Refined she was not. We never saw her made up or with lipstick on. But she was a lady, always friendly, rather pliable at times, never an opinionated arguer, no know-it-all. And within the soft shell there was a core of steel. She was “resilient” before the term was incorporated into management-speak. She knew how to show the door to impertinent peddlers and how to dispatch the phone-marketing scum specializing in aggressing the elderly. Without ever using the word, she was also some kind of a feminist. When her husband – our father – saw no need for investing in higher education of the girls, my sisters, as they would get married and have kids anyway, she laid down the simple law: “if he gets to go, they go too,” meaning my chance to go to “Gymnasium” and therefore to university. When as a crafts teacher she found out that the boys’ classes got town money and the girls’ did not, she forced the council to make the budget even.
***
The steel came from the suffering. In the summer of 1924, at four and a half years of age, she suddenly could not move away from a calf running toward her. Her legs did not move. She was scared, she told us later. Her father went to the post office to call the doctor (there was no phone in the house) who allegedly came on horseback. The doctor diagnosed polio and ordered the little girl to be brought to Balgrist hospital in Zurich. The train station had to be reached by bicycle, the sick girl sitting on the handlebar with no grip to hold on. Another scary experience, she told us, as the road was unpaved and full of potholes. After eight weeks in the hospital, the crippled left foot was forced for years into a steel-and-leather contraption. It worked, painfully, and the girl recovered with but a small limp for the later one hundred years. But she had many bullets to bite, always trying to catch up, never resigning or giving up. There was no talk of “special needs” or special treatment at the time. Some things simply remained unattainable, most prominently among them the more advanced “secondary” school four miles away. To attend, a student needed a bicycle, as the “school bus” was unheard of in the 1920s. A bicycle was out of reach, due to both her inability to ride and the family’s lack of wherewithal.
***
After eight years of school, she learned a trade. An “apprenticeship” with a master business operator, as it is the custom in the German-speaking countries. Not quite usual for a girl at the time, and not affordable for everybody, as the apprentice was to pay a “Lehrgeld” (“apprentice’s fee”). She would have liked to learn “something in an office, something with numbers,” she told us, but when the father asked the local bank for an apprenticeship, they turned him down: mir nä keni meitli – “we don’t take girls.” So she became a seamstress, the apprenticeship consisting of 6 days of work per week at no pay and the additional duty of taking care of a two-year old. Later, trained and ready, she worked as a journeywoman going from household to household, on foot or on the bicycle she eventually learned to master. The first earnings, she told us, went for a dentist, and the second ones for a bicycle which was the common mode of transportation back then. It was word-of-mouth-business, at 5 Francs per day. At almost 30 years old she married and had three children. At 40 she had her own house, with a huge garden. A little later the volunteering job as teacher’s assistant in crafts class, introducing generations of village girls to sewing and knitting. Some of them she encountered more than fifty years later as caregivers at the nursing home.
***
I doubt that our mother ever heard of “work ethic,” but she sure had it. Her life was work and movement. Mache – doing something – was her every day’s calling. She never did a sport or “exercised,” but she sure kept fit. She purposely put things in the upper cupboards of the kitchen, as it forced her to stretch. Almost blind, she regularly walked into the village to shop. Her main occupation was the garden. In a good summer, she was self-sufficient with vegetables and berries. At 100 years old, she planted her last potatoes, on the one side of the bed where the almost blind eyes could make out the row. That same April she helped replant her geraniums. I never saw her happier.
***
Later in her 101st year, the predictable happened. She fell, suffered fractures, had to leave the house, and enter the town nursing home. It was a bitter experience. “The final station” she observed, pointedly unenthusiastic. But she went on. Whenever she found somebody to go along (on account of quasi-blindness she was forbidden to do it alone), she went for walks. When she broke her back after the 103rd birthday, she quite unexpectedly recovered to see another summer, another wonderful fall and another birthday.
***
She hardly ever complained. When you asked her how she was doing, she assured everybody that she was fine. When she was still living alone, tending to her house, she used to say Esch öppe aus ir Ornig – “all’s quite in order.”
***
We put it on the death announcement.