Love Among the Ruins: a Phone Reminder Of Lives Lost Long Ago. Born in The Age of Hitler Dead During The Dying Days of The Welfare State.

Today, my phone reminded me of things past. I was prompted to look at snaps from the summer of 2019 when it was the before times, and there was a languid hopefulness to things.

Grief over my dad's death seven months previous lingered. But it was more like music playing off in the distance, present but not overpowering.

Long and short-term plans I made then with the brash certainty there would be time enough to cram all of my living into every single day.

I was finishing up a book proposal about how I helped make my dad The World's Oldest Rebel over the last decade of his life. Now finished and metaphorically sitting dusty in a drawer.

I was in a relationship and the happier for it. It was a season of great unawareness for me, for you, for everyone. Days were as long, lazy and brilliantly as bright as Summer in 1913 before the Great War.

I am glad it was that way not knowing what 2020 and beyond had on offer. We were Lennie Of Mice and Men looking at the water, enjoying the view, while behind us a gun was cocked behind our head with its trigger ready to be pulled.

Covid and then my cancer, this new lung disease of mine, the cost of living crisis, a war in Europe, fascism thriving on all the populated continents, and that climate emergency are good enough omens for me. We exist in a time  where the worst is yet to come. .

However, the end-of-times aperitif taste in my mouth does not overpower joy, laughter, day-to-day pettiness or my need to dissent against the forces who want to steal our right to a life of purpose, love and dignity.

I think I get my distrust of hopeful endings from my mother, who died 24 years ago on this day. She was born in an era when it was wise to distrust happy endings for all. Mum was a baby during the last years of the Weimar Republic and five years old when Hitler became Germany's genocidal dictator.

My mother had great empathy and a novelist's perception of human character. She liked parties, laughter, books, friendship, dancing, drinking, compliments, and restaurants that didn't have to be expensive but had to know how to present a good table. She was a forgiving woman to others who could never forgive her trespasses or the times as humans do; she betrayed others for self-interest.

No question my father loved her, and she him because near the time of her dying; mum said to me, "I am glad I could give your father the love he needed to survive."

But that is a love that is also sacrificing for another. My dad knew it but her children did not.

Dad tried to give her an existence worthy of that sacrifice. But the fates weren't kind. My brother became ill with schizophrenia during their golden years. That changed their retirement plans from caring for their needs to becoming a caregiver to a son who drew the short genetic straw in our family.

The times before all of that unravelling of our nuclear family from mental illness in my adolescence when my brothers were becoming young men weren't great either. It was normal family dysfunction produced during the dying days of the Welfare State. But some episodes from my teenage years when I recall them, feel like a Long Day's Journey into Night performed by a summer suburban troop of actors. In the late 1970s and 1980s, neither our parents nor us, their children, knew how to chill- except Dad. He wanted to make everybody happy and help those he loved find their dreams. But the dreams my brothers and me held for our lives were enmeshed in traumas endured long ago by our parents. The unspeakable horrors of hunger, homelessness, abuse both physical and sexual or the cruelty of Nazism has a half-life for its victims as long as radioactive waste. It's toxic forever more. So, my parents had scars from all of that. It made them fascinating people, loving, kind, full of life and also so very sad. They were certainly not boring but profoundly fucked up.

When my mum lay dying, she did not want to leave. She was afraid. Mum was also angry at the gambler's table of life. It had cheated her too quickly out of her chips. She struggled with death, and sometimes lashed out with me for crying too much. "It's hard enough as it is, John."

But the thrashing, the gnashing against mortality's tick down and the hope it was only a bad dream didn't last long. It rarely does, from what I have seen of death and people's last breaths.

When she died. Her body was like a husk. Looking at it,  I knew Mum had checked out of the body. It was a hotel room now, never to be occupied again.

Her corpse didn't have her vitality, femininity loyalty, laughter, hurt, pride, empathy, generosity, love, vanity, and beauty. It was desolate of her enigma and the many secrets from her life that she shared with no one, not even my dad.

Twenty-four years gone, and I can still detect my mum's life force in me as if it was a perfume that lingers in a room from a woman who has just left it. When I go, I fear no scent will remain to be remembered by anyone. 

Elfriede Gisele Smith October 20, 1928-July 2, 1999

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