Meet the Family… My Mother, Anita

My mom is a trooper and I say that for two reasons.  First, she is, in fact, a trooper, though not of the law enforcement variety as I will make clear in a moment.  Second, calling someone a trooper is the highest compliment that you can get from my mom, so it is fitting that I give it to her. 

A trooper, in my mom’s eyes, is someone who faces a great deal of adversity, but nonetheless soldiers forward and does so, importantly, without complaint.  A trooper hopes for better luck next time, but does not not expect it.  A trooper puts his or her own best interests aside in order to better serve the interests of others. 

As I said, my mom is a trooper.

She married my dad when she was just 18 years old and spent the next seven years trying to get pregnant.  After giving up virtually all hope, she became pregnant with my sister.  Two years later, when she was 27, my mom’s father (my grandfather) died.  The next year, she became pregnant with me.  When she was 29, and I about a year old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She endured radiation treatments and a radical mastectomy — rough stuff even now,  but especially so back then.  She did not even have the strength to pick me up and hold me for quite some time.

Later in life, she would watch her older sister die from cancer in her 50s and see her daughter (my sister) diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 35.  Not long after that, my mom’s first grandchild (my daughter) was diagnosed with a heart defect that would require open heart surgery to repair shortly after her first birthday.  Three years ago, my mom spent Christmas in the hospital with a baseball-sized aneurysm in the area between her neck and collarbone.  When the intern at the hospital first saw it, he literally backed away in fear.  The surgery performed to fix it was so new and so rare, the doctors asked my mom if they could write her case up in a medical journal.  (Being a trooper, she said yes.)

The idea of being a trooper has been and continues to be a powerful one in my life — sometimes in good ways, sometimes less so.  Most everybody likes a trooper and I like to be liked as much as the next guy.  The challenge I have encountered is in taking trooper-dom to the extreme — or, perhaps more accurately, only halfway.  For example, I am not very good at telling people what I want or need, which is classic trooper.  But then I tend to get angry and disappointed when no one seems to be giving me what I want or need, which is not very trooper-like at all.  Like my mom, I often hope for the best, but expect the worst.  I also understand, however, that this is a fairly shitty way to go through life and have found, as well, that there is a fine line between hoping for the best and believing that you somehow do not DESERVE the best. 

My mom had a colonoscopy today and my dad sent my sister and me an e-mail this afternoon letting us know that everything had gone well.  “She handled it just like the trooper she is,” he wrote.     

Meet the Family… My Grandmother, Gertrude

Three of my four grandparents had already passed away by the time I was born in 1968.  The one grandparent who was alive back then — my maternal grandmother, Gertrude – is still alive today.  At 97, she is hard of hearing, legally blind, and largely confined to her apartment in Rego Park, Queens, where she has lived for nearly 40 years and where, since a stay in the hospital over the holidays last year, she now lives with Mabel, her full-time caretaker from Namibia.

I’ve been lucky to have had many positive influences in my life, but I don’t think anyone has had a greater impact on me than my grandmother.   We’ve always been extremely close.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was a baby.  As she fought — and won –her battle with cancer, my grandmother stepped into the breach and took care of me and my older sister.   That bond has never broken.

My grandmother was born in Germany, the tenth of ten children.  There is a picture in her apartment of her and several of her siblings.  She is about two or three years old in the picture and she is sitting on a bench, not smiling, not scowling, just sitting.  She stayed in Germany through World War I, but emigrated to the United States in the mid-1930’s. 

She came to this country to be with my grandfather, Steve.  She met him at a party held in his honor when he, a recent immigrant to the U.S., returned to Germany for a visit from New York City.  They were married shortly after her arrival in America in a church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, known then as Germantown for its high concentration of immigrants from that country.  Their wedding picture hangs in the hallway of my house today.  My grandmother doesn’t like the picture very much at all because she has on a “sourpuss,” but I think it is beautiful.   

My grandmother remained an incredibly vital, energetic woman well into her 80’s.  In 1989, I took a summer internship in New York City.  I needed a place to live and couldn’t afford anything on my own.  My grandmother invited me to live with her in Queens and it was a lot of fun.  One night, I showed up at her apartment incredibly late at night with a few friends of mine.  My grandmother greeted us at the front door.  “Who wants a steak?” she asked, ready to begin cooking for us right then and there.    

The following year, I moved to an apartment of my own on the Upper East Side, just a few blocks away from where my grandmother had once lived.  It was a tiny studio apartment, smaller than the master bathroom in my house today.  It had a “half kitchen,” which made cooking (to the extent that a 22-year-old guy cooks at all) quite difficult.  Occasionally, the buzzer would ring and it would be my grandmother, who had taken the subway from her apartment to mine to bring me pot roast or chicken cutlets.

At the turn of the century, amid all the hoopla about the new millenium, I asked my grandmother for her view on the greatest advance made in her lifetime.  I expected her to give me an obvious answer — the airplane, the telephone.  “Hot running water,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation.  Oh.

One of my grandmother’s favorite sayings is, “Live well and go quick.”  This has taken on new significance as her vitality has faded in recent years.  We recently celebrated her 97th birthday at a restaurant near her apartment.  Several well wishers commented that she would probably make it to be 100.  “Don’t wish that on me,” she said.  “I’m ready for judgment day.”

My dear, sweet Oma, I love you so very much.  You have taught me so many things.  How to be a good boy, a good man, a good friend, a good husband, a good father.  You have lived well and I, too, hope that when your time comes, you go quick.  But I sure will miss you.