Pictures of the Past

I spent my weekend in Bremen, where my aunt and uncle as well as my Grandma live. I went there because my Grandma is now nearly 89 years old and she is getting very very forgetful. Meaning, if she knows who you are its already very good.
I wanted to see her before I go to Brazil as in this age, you never know what happens. So it came that I spent some hours drinking tea or coffee with her and saying all the same things over and over again. Sad somehow, great on the otherhand.

It is just so very sad to see that she always feels lonely. Even if you spend many many hours with her together, as soon as you are out of the door she will feel alone and think, forgetting about the visitors she had earlier, that noone cares or comes to see her. The thought of her feeling so alone makes me sad and crazy.

On the other hand, she seems to feel satisfied with her life and the world around her. She does not complain about more than being lonely and she arranges her life as good as she can. That makes me proud. It makes me proud because she had a rough life the first 20 or 25 years. Her mom died early and she was sent to a very strict boarding school which she hated. As soon as she could leave she left to Paris to study french and become a translator. She came back to Germany when World War II had started and her hometown Nürnberg had been bombed. There she stood, a young girl with a suitcase in front of the empty burnt down house of her parents.
Later, her younger brother and father were killed at the war-front and she had many more years of horror and war to live through.
My grandma married my grandfather, however, she was not good enough for her mum(ster)-in-law. Not even with a grandchild for her parents-in-law she was good-enough, as it was only a girl. It was only a couple of years later that things changed, but then they really did and I think my grandma had an amazing live with three great children and a wonderful husband. They lived in Hamburg, Caracas (Venezuela), Munich and Frankfurt; and the appartment in Spain was (and is still) always filled with family. Probably these great years made up for the trouble she had encountered, resulting in that satisfaction that she seems to have regardless of her lonelyness and her fading strength to walk around or to remember things...

Before I drove home yesterday, we sat at her little coffee table and looked at old and very old pictures from my family. Cute pictures of me, my sister and my cousins; pictures of my young dad and his sisters; pictures of my grandparents. She didn't recognize to much and kept confusing my cousins or me with my dad when he was little, but yet she enjoyed looking at all those pictures I think.

In the end I found a picture of my dad, on the balcony of their appartement in Hamburg-Altona, being nearly two years old. His blond hair goes all the way over his ears, he smiles, wears a bib overall of cord-rows and a white longsleeve shirt underneath. He looks exactly like a girl. Like me. We put a picture of me, age one and a half, next to it. I smile, my blond curly hair reaches my ears and I am wearing a rose-couloured cord-row bib overall and a white longsleeve shirt underneath. If it wasn't for the black/white vs. coloured, one could exchange the picture from 1955 with the picture from 1986 easily.