„It‘s so obvious!“, my witch complains about every opening sentence that I have attempted to write for this blog post yet. Sometimes, it takes time to realize the most obvious things, even if they wait at every corner everyday. Or maybe even because they do.
This one is about the dead which I have envied in my blog posts so often. So, if you are reading this, be warned that this post will deal with topics such as death, mourning and suicide. If that is too much, stop reading right here. I have a lot of other posts to read for a witching vibe!
„It‘s just as obvious as who stole the last piece of cake at 4 AM “, my witch giggles over my shoulder, and I of course have no idea what she is talking about, except that some nights are just tough to get through.
To write this post, I would first like to ask if there is (or was) someone in this world who makes you feel like you belong? Do you have someone who is so similar or complementary to yourself that being around them makes you understand why you are the kind of person you are? Someone who makes you realize where you come from and how you ended up where you are now?
To me, this always was my grandmother on my father‘s side of the family.
I look a lot like her. I have her eyes and her body shape. Especially the second part always mattered a lot to me, since I do not share this with my mother. Since my mother is a very skinny person (although she eats and lives in the most unhealthy way you can imagine), people always wondered how she could have given birth to such a curvy little girl like me. I was never seriously overweight, but definitely always a bit curvy. Short and round would describe me.
I still wear my grandmother‘s clothes. We two just belonged together.
I also still cook and bake her recipes. She was always the first one to read the little short stories I wrote as a child, when I could barely write most of the words I wanted to use – she and I had a connection like no one else in my family wanted to have with me. Other family members constantly criticized my curvy body and my dreams of becoming a writer and doing art.
She was the person that made me accept and understand why I was in this world. Even when I was in my worst gothic phase as a teenager, she would sit down with me and look at my photographs and drawings and read my disturbing prose I wrote, and she always found something in them she liked. Together, we ate plum cake, had coffee and the world felt better for a little moment.
My grandmother was the most warm-hearted person I have ever known. When my cousin and I were older and lived further away, she became the third grandmother of the neighbour‘s child and began to knit socks for him instead of us (until I also asked her for colorful socks and she happily made some for her oldest granddaughter as well). When my grandfather had died and her health declined, she made every appointment of a nurse a reason to buy cake and have a coffee with them. Very soon, they told her everything about their children and their families and she gave them advice.
The circumstances her death have questioned my general will to live.
To understand why, we will have to remember the horrible year of 2020.
Another lockdown has us all stuck at home. I do not go to work or to classes to finish my degree, and I do not see my friends. I have not visited my family since last Christmas either.
It‘s November the 15th, and so I call my grandmother to congratulate her to her 90th birthday.
„Wait, wait!“, my witch interrupts. „Are you going to complain about a 90 year old dying? For real? Back in my days, women were lucky to survive up to the age of 25.“
I role my eyes at her with a passion that gives me a headache. „You know very well that this is not true. Once you survived every cold you ever had as a child as well as your first few times of giving birth, you could live up to your hair turning white.“ And my witch blushes at this spontaneous history lesson.
“You have to replace the milk with egg liqueur”, my witch shyly whispers over my shoulder and into my bowl, as I try to recreate a happy moment.
So, back to my grandmother.
Calling her, I expected to talk to her as I always. Long conversations about whatever would come to our mind.
But it was nothing like that.
She did not recognize me at first, and then repeatedly asked when I would come and visit her and I could not give her an answer. The next thing she wanted to know was when I would finally be finishing my degree, which I also could not tell her. After that, she retreated into memories. Memories of how I had been on vacation to the Baltic sea with them when I was a little child, or how on Christmas we all used to get together (especially before my parents got a divorce and it all got chaotic).
Then, she pointed out how she was not seeing anyone anymore.
And 3 weeks later, she was dead.
She had fallen asleep in her living room.
This was at least peaceful, but I knew how the new loneliness and silence of being alive in the pandemic had challenged her. She kind of knew that she would probably not live long enough to get her usual amount of visitors again, or to see me and my cousin achieve certain things in life.
A year without these things and with no perspective on anything getting better within your life span can be very long.
It broke my heart that her last year had been this.
I sometimes caught myself thinking: „I wish she had died earlier.“ And what kind of thought is that? What kind of makes you wish your dearest family members died earlier, because the state of the world was so horrible?
This challenged my general will to live. It made me feel suicidal much too often. It made me get drunk and cut. It convinced that there could not ever be a lucky spark or a glimpse if warmth in this world.
Then, when the war against Ukraine started, I also thought of her again. I carry a Polish family name in real life, and although I was born and raised in Germany and in German, my grandparents still had a slavic touch to everything. From their furniture to the humor and the food you got at their place. I feel at home in many slavic countries at first sight, thanks to them, and my grandmother had been very happy when I had once shown her photographs of me traveling Poland and visiting friends there. That a friendship across that border was possible again had really touched her heart.
It would have broken them to see this war explode.
I was glad that she was not alive to witness this.
I was glad that my most dearest family member was dead once again.
This thought has send me spiraling too often. It challenged my will to live out of existence regularly over the past 3 years. In what kind of world do I live if that is my conclusion? In a world in which the dead are better off, it does not make any sense to achieve your goals, or to think of any kind of future!
I am currently fighting this spiral, but it is still a trap in the back of my head which I can fall into if I don‘t watch out.
I wish to live in a world in which my grandmother would like to be alive.
Only in such a world could I keep functioning, or even think about having children myself.
Between more and more conflicts exploding into war and climate change uprooting the life as we know it, I very often don‘t know how to do it.
But as I said, I am fighting this spiral, because a rational part of me insists that it is possible somehow.
What also helped was that recently I’ve found an old recipe book my grandmother once gave me. On the last page, I found a handwritten recipe of a plum cake, which I loved as a child. I had assumed that she took that recipe to the grave with her, but I have it now. I can make the cake I loved most and that reminded me of my most happy moments growing up. The secret ingredient was indeed egg liqueur, which my grandmother even made herself.
“That seemed to have been her secret ingredient to everything, obviously”, my witch giggles, as she reads through my grandmother’s notes. “And you have never fully realized her death, obviously.”
She was a very sweet person. And I will try not to spiral too much anymore.
Mistress witch writes 