MAY 17, 2021
Today would be my brother Gernot’s sixtieth birthday. In my memory he is always the beautiful young boy, the athletic, vivacious sixteen-year-old. But when I look at the photograph of him on my dresser, taken a few months before his death, I don’t see a boy of sixteen. I see a young man with a knowing sad smile, a handsome, tan face with high cheekbones; he could have been twenty-five or thirty-five, and if I imagine the same face with a few wrinkles and gray hair I can easily conjure up the sixty-year old he would be today. Fit, slim, a mountaineer and explorer perhaps, or a lawyer or teacher, who loves the outdoors and goes climbing or skiing every chance he gets. That was his passion, and I don’t think he’d have changed that much. I imagine that he did get to climb the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, which had been his dream for a future he never got to live. And I imagine that he and I would be close and talk at least once a week.
I had a brief WhatsApp video call with my sister Ute, who is busy in Paris teaching and promoting her new book.
“How did we ever get this old?” she asked and we smiled sadly at each other on the screen. She will be sixty-three in July, I will be fifty-seven in October. Our brother was in the middle. She said she’d thought about him all day but when I asked her what she remembered her face looked sad and tired. It was 11 PM in Europe, just about her bedtime, and early afternoon in California—time for my lunch. She was smoking a cigarette and I immediately had a craving to smoke, although I quit for good over a year ago, and even before that only smoked occasionally once a month or so. She inhaled and blew out the enticing smoke with a long sigh.
“I mostly remember the last year, that horrible time. That last visit in the hospital…”
New Year’s Eve 1977: we visited Gernot in the hospital with our parents. Elvis Presley sang “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill” on the radio, and our sweet, frail brother, who was dying (which I didn’t know), smiled and asked to turn it up because Elvis Presley was one of his favorite singers. And when at midnight the traditional Blue Danube waltz was played, our parents waltzed around the room a little, just because they did this every year, and maybe they wanted to imbue this worst New Years Eve of all time with a sense of hope and normalcy, mainly for him and for me; neither of us had been told that he was dying. My sister, being the oldest, knew because on her last visit home from university she had confronted our mother and demanded to know what was really going on with Gernot.
“He looks like Opa,” she said, referring to our very old and very thin grandfather, who walked bent-over and with a cane. She could tell that her brother’s illness had nothing to do with the aftermath of a hernia operation (which was the story our parents had been telling for months). The word “cancer” was taboo, no one was allowed to say it out loud in our house. But when pressed for the truth our mother broke down crying and told my sister that our brother was dying of cancer. It was a few days before Christmas—the only Christmas in our family’s history that was undocumented by Mom’s camera. Many years later I found a photo album from that year; in the middle of the album there was a blank white page with two dates and notes in my mother’s handwriting: November 8th, 1977: Ingeborg’s Eye Surgery. January 3rd, 1978: Gernot’s Death. She had not taken any pictures during the two months in between.
Each morning, as my bright-eyed young Border Collie Jesse jumps on the bed to wake me at six or six thirty, always at a time when it is too early for me to get up, I feel low and “mutlos”– which could be loosely translated as “hopeless”, but what it literally means is “courage-less” or “without courage”. I remember waking up like this in the years after my brother died. That’s when I first encountered this feeling of having lost all courage to live, to go on, to look ahead. I call it depression, but I think it is probably grief. I want to cry every morning, but I try not to because I’m afraid that once I start I won’t be able to stop. I put my hand on my heart the way I did as a teenager when it felt like my heart was breaking from having lost him. A part of me feels like I have slipped into my mother’s anxious, sad body and mind, picking up where she left off. It’s as if my body and my heart can’t let go of her brokenness and pain. She died over a year ago, and now whatever she’d held together for me—my love and connection to her, to my sister and my brother’s memory, to my nephew and his children, seems frayed and precarious. Everything feels unreal and untrue (I wrote this last night before bed: “Maybe I can’t find the truth in my writing because I can’t find the truth in my living.”)
But I do have other memories of my brother, and they’re not just sad ones. Some of them involve water and happy, careless vacation days in Italy or on the island of Corsica, of sleeping outside under the stars by the sea. Some of them are of special moments at home like the time when Gernot and I went skinny dipping in our pool under a full moon.
I don’t remember where our parents were that night, it might have been the time when they were gone for a few days on a trip with friends, either to Italy or to the mountains, leaving the two of us alone and Gernot in charge (our sister was already away at university). He was so conscientious about watching over me and protecting me. We took the bus home together every day after school; once he gave me a ride on his motorcycle, making me wear his big, blue helmet—which meant that he was already sixteen, and he was already ill. In the late seventies in Austria you couldn’t legally drive a motorcycle until you’d turned sixteen. During that week we ate lunch at the local village pub almost daily, sitting at a table by the window, looking out at the little baroque church and the cemetery surrounding it. The same cemetery where he had told our mother he would like to be buried “someday”, with a view of the mountains. And where, only months later, she had the church add an extra plot at the spot her son had picked for himself. Her sixteen-year old son, who had never been told but who instinctively knew he was going to die.
What did we talk about in those precious days, when I had my older brother, whom I adored and felt intimidated by, all to myself?
One night there was a knock on the door of my room.
“It’s a full moon,” he said, “Let’s go swimming in the pool.” “Now??” I might have replied, but very proud that he had asked me to join him. He suggested we go skinny dipping, since it was night, and no one could see us. I stopped what I was doing, either getting ready for bed or reading.
“Okay,” I said quickly before I could change my mind or lose heart, because he had asked me, and I would do anything he asked.
The moon lit up our yard, it’s light reflected in the water’s smooth surface. The lawn smelled of cut grass, which he had mowed earlier that day, pushing the heavy lawn mower back and forth, row after row, only wearing his bathing trunks, his slim torso with tan, smooth skin, the body of a boy who liked sports—swimming, mountain climbing, and of course skiing in the winter (He was the best and most elegant skier I ever knew). The mowing of the lawn was his job, and he did it proudly without complaints.
The stones on the patio were still warm from a sun-filled day. We rushed out to the pool, shedding our clothes not in the small dressing room we usually changed in but dropping them near the edge of the pool, and as soon as we were naked, jumped in quickly. It wasn’t a heated pool but during hot summer days it warmed up to a pleasant temperature. The water was refreshing and warm at the same time, and my naked body seemed to be floating, I felt weightless and almost transparent. I was suddenly wide awake and happy. We were both shy in our nakedness, our bodies gleaming white beneath the water’s surface. Yet we were also giddy and felt exhilarated by the silky feel of the water surrounding us and the bright light of the moon shining down on us.
“This is amazing!”, we called out to each other, “The water feels great, we should do this more often!” And we swam back and forth many times, lap after lap, getting quiet and contemplative. Swimming at night wasn’t something we had ever done before. During the day we’d splash and dive and play water games with our friends or make cannon balls, or he’d swim up to me and “accidently” push my head under water and hold it there just a little too long for it to be cute or funny.
But in this full moon night the mood between us was calm and harmonious; all we could hear was the gentle splashing of our arms and legs parting the water and our breathing. All we felt was our shyness and sweet affection for each other, sharing this delicious moment of doing something together we had never done before, almost like two young lovers who are starting to awaken to the true nature of their connection.
EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL
“Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.”
- Mark Nepo
She loved sunsets, and so do I. We’d sit, enraptured on the beach in Italy or Greece where we’d gone for our summer vacation, and watch the sun “sink into the ocean”, as my mother liked to describe it. Sometimes a ship would float by and move through the orange-yellow ball touching the horizon. That was the most beautiful of all. The sea, the horizon, the sun setting, the ship… the dark blue sky streaked with colors from pink to red to purple. It was a kind of religious experience for us.
While driving back from the Berkeley Marina last week in the twilight and pink-orange afterglow of the sunset, I took the shortcut my mother discovered many years ago during one of her visits—the fastest way from the Marina Hotel to our house; she was so proud when she described it to me (and I have been taking it ever since). She’d pull up in front of our house in her small rental car, and as she was walking up the front steps she’d start talking to me before I even got a chance to open the door—as if she couldn’t wait to start our conversation again from the day before, as if the thoughts and questions (mostly about my life and work) that were crowding her mind couldn’t be contained anymore. I got so irritated by this! I’d hear her voice outside the closed door I was about to open: “Du, Ingelein…” she’d start—much the same as I used to start our talks so long ago sitting by the fireplace in our living room: “Du, Mutti…” She’d always put down whatever she was reading and turn to me, patiently. “Yes, darling, what is it?” Needless to say, I didn’t have the same kind of patience with her all those years later, when all she wanted to do was visit and spend time with me and my husband, enjoy our little house in Berkeley and our company. I had no patience with her anxiety and nervous energy, with the intrusive way she asked questions or made suggestions—even though in hindsight much of her advice was thoughtful and wise.
As I was driving that evening with our lovely young dog Jesse in the back seat looking intently out the rear window at cars and motorcycles whizzing by much to his excitement, I thought about a mother’s devotional love for her children. I could feel it in my body, my mother’s love for me, her longing and deep devotion to my well-being. It was almost too much to feel. I cried, because she is not here anymore for me to show her that I understand now that I’m older. I cried because I was never really able to experience that unique kind of love a mother has for her child. I cried because, all those years ago, I didn’t meet her at the door with love and patience, didn’t take a deep breath and let go of my irritation and didn’t respond to her with kindness. I didn’t appreciate that her nervous way of talking was just her way of trying to connect with me. What made her so anxious in my presence? Was it her fear of my rejection, my scrutiny and critical dismissal? Yet, I always looked forward to her visits; I wasn’t homesick for her the way I had been as a child when sent away to summer camp, but I always had that longing for her in my body. And the joy at seeing her when she first arrived here was real and visceral. I could not wait for her to get here and, after a few days, I couldn’t wait for her to leave.