Today is my mother’s 72nd birthday. She wants no gifts. She has everything she needs. And so it is always challenging to find a way to acknowledge the day and honor my mother short of a phone call where our family sings her an always memorable rendition of “Happy Birthday” through the telephone wires…no, I need to think of something else…something REALLY special.
And then it came to mind…The Birthday Card. A few years back, my mother brought me a very special birthday card to keep in my archives…a card about 60 years old. Yes, I am the unofficial keeper of records and memorabilia and history for our family…and so it seems that every time my parents come to visit another “memento” or two arrives at Sky Ranch for safe-keeping. The task of remembering all the stories behind them is becoming daunting…perhaps I should begin cataloging it all…Oh, yeah, OK sure…I’ll just add that to my “to do” list…
This extraordinary card was sent to my mother, Marion, on the occasion of her 9th birthday, by her mother, Herta. Stricken with tuberculosis, Herta was confined to a hospital in the Harz in Germany. This was the last birthday card Herta would ever send her daughter…
This handmade card is one of the few personal effects my mother has left from her childhood. Her childhood was cut short when her mother Herta succumbed to the disease only months later. And so, all young Marion had left of her mother was this card…this precious, beautiful card.
My daughter, Larissa is 9 years old. And so I imagine what it must have been like for Herta to know that her daughter’s 9th birthday was approaching and how desperately she wanted to send her daughter, Marion something really special even though she herself was confined to the hospital, knowing perhaps that she was dying. Knowing that she may never see her beautiful daughter again…
Surely, Herta confided her feelings of desperation and concern for her daughter’s future to her housemates, other women suffering the same fate as she to include the famed Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel who had no children of her own. My mother believes this card was illustrated by the artist of Hummel figurine fame…Maria Hummel, whom historical records place in several Harz region sanatoriums (i.e. hospitals) between 1944 and 1946 for treatment of tuberculosis during the same time that Herta was hospitalized. Could it be that Sister Maria Hummel herself illustrated this birthday card on behalf of Herta, mother of Marion?
I believe wholeheartedly that this is so. When I was just an early teen, my mother wished so desperately for a Hummel figurine, but in the larger scheme of things in life, a porcelain figurine is unnecessary and often expensive. Regardless, I took it upon myself as a mission to make this wish come true for my mother. And so I saved all my babysitting money to buy my mother her first Hummel for Christmas one year when I was only 12 or 13 or so. I cried more than my mother did upon giving her this gift only because I knew what it would mean to her and also because the anticipation had been killing me for months!
Over the years, my mother has amassed an impressive collection of Hummel figurines, only to be stowed carefully away in case of earthquakes (my parents live in California). We don’t see the figurines on display anymore, but we know they are there.
Herta is the grandmother I never knew, but I know she is there. I found this image today taken of the abandoned and decaying Sanatorium Harz also known as the “Koenigsberg-Hospital” which was used between 1885 and 1970 to heal patients suffering from tuberculosis and later as a home for handicapped children. I don’t know for sure if Herta was there, but if she was, I can only imagine her peering from one of the windows as in Sister Maria Hummel’s birthday card illustration. To think of Oma Herta confined to such a place to never embrace her daughters, Marion and Brigitte one last time, and explain why…well, it just breaks my heart.
Nowadays, we explain everything to our children. At least we try. Perhaps, then … 60 years ago, there was no time, or parents believed it was better to “spare” the children the truth and not explain horrible things like death and why we might be going away…f o r e v e r…
I believe that every daughter needs her mother and in the love and nurturing that only a mother can give. My heart breaks for my grandmother, Herta at the pain of knowing she would leave her daughters behind and for my mother and her young sister, Brigitte, for having to grow up without a mother just when they needed one most.
If we are lucky, birthdays will come and go, and we will live long. And if we are lucky, we will, at least once in our lives, receive a birthday card whose message and imagery will sustain for a lifetime…just as my mother’s card has sustained her, and me…and, because I am the keeper of history…you can be sure I will share the story and card with my daughter, Larissa, AND my son, Samuel, who WILL know their great-grandmother if only because of “The Birthday Card”. The card explains several things…where my mother’s love for Hummel figurines originated and also how stoic Herta and other women facing the same dismal fate had to be. Could Herta not have also written the words, “Ich liebe Dich” or “Ich vermisse Dich”? (I love you. I miss you.) Or were those words said simply in the action of creating and sending the card. I think so.
As I handle the fragile card in order to carefully stow it away, I feel the presence of Herta, my grandmother within my own hands, and I imagine how she once carefully folded this card and placed it in an envelope 5 days before her daughter Marion’s 9th birthday and had it sent off at the local POST in order to make sure her daughter received it on time.
Don’t get me wrong, but in a world full of Internet, Email, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, I cherish the fact that our family will always have something really special and tangible to remember Oma Herta and the love for her daughter, Marion, by…The Birthday Card.
Happy Birthday Mammi!!
We love you!
S, D, S & L…(& your Mama…)
by Susann
no comments