Hopefully, My Mother is Finally at Peace

R.I.P. Inge Guttmann 3/25/1933 - 5/1/2022

My mother died over the weekend, and before you send over your sympathies and condolences and kind thoughts (which I do appreciate), this was not a surprise, and it has been a long time coming for her. 

She’s been deeply unhappy for over two years as her mind and ability to communicate and talk has started to drift away with various stages of dementia. In the year since I last saw her in person (Mother’s Day 2021), she’s just been slipping further and further away. It had become even more difficult to communicate with her whenever my sister would connect us via video chat. There was a bit of a scare in March before her 89th birthday that made me think she wouldn’t make it much longer, but then she continued to live on and actually managed to outlive my father (who died less than a week after his 89th birthday). Apparently, she had stopped eating and lost a lot of weight and was basically just sleeping for the last week or so. I talked to her a few days ago, though I have no idea if she could hear or understand me.

It took me a bit of time to just figure out what I wanted to write about Mom or how much I wanted to share. I know that I do tend to overshare, but this was something very personal that part of me wanted to keep for myself. Only a handful of people reading this will have had a chance to meet her, so I guess I’d like everyone who didn’t get to know her to learn a bit more about her and how much she meant to me.

I think most people are well aware of the last part if they remember that I spent much of 2013 living with her, and we went on quite a few trips together in the years that preceded and followed it. I got to spend a lot of great quality time with my mother, even if we did have some issues when we were living together for those 10 months. I haven’t had a great time in my life, and my mother was always my biggest support, whatever I decided to do. She never pushed me to go to college and didn’t flinch when I decided to go into the music business or my career as a writer. She really was my rock in many ways even though she also could be very frustrating to deal with.

If you’re a person who knows me well in real life and consider us friends, then hopefully you know that I do have a few good qualities that maybe aren’t as prevalent to people who only know me from my online persona. 

If you’re a woman who appreciates the way I treat you or other women, that’s all stuff I got from my mother, and in some ways, also my father. For most of my teen and older years, my mother was the primary bread-winner in my house. Because my father was 11 years older, she later would become his caregiver until he died in 2010. It would be absolutely impossible for me not to have huge respect for women just from being around my mother for so much of my life.

It was really sad to see my mother fading away and not being able to communicate. At a certain point, she was just no longer the woman who I have known my entire life Part of me has been a bit distraught about not having a job or the funds to have gone to Ohio to see her before she died, but it was really tough for me to see her in such a sad state, and I worry that it might make it harder to remember her in better days.

But let’s talk some more about my mother before old age and medical issues sidelined her. She’s not someone who had an easy life, having lost her father at a very young age before she and her mother left Nazi Germany to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina for a number of decades. I don’t know a lot about her time there except that her mother owned a dress shop, and apparently, no less than Eva Peron shopped there for dresses. I’m not even sure I know why my mother came to New York in the early ‘60s, met my father (another German emigré who ended up in Brazil with his family) at a party, the two of them got married, had my older brother Rob and then a few years later, me, and four years after that, my sister Lilian. I’m not sure if we were the easiest kids to raise, but she did a lot of travelling and relocating for my father’s work before we ended up in Massachusetts and then Connecticut.

But to be honest, she was also not the easiest mother to have, as my brother would attest. He probably got into more fights with her, and they had a much more frictious relationship than I had with her. Of course, I also didn’t live in the same town/area as her, other than my cancer year in 2013, so we could enjoy our time together whenever I’d go to wherever she was living. I tried to visit twice a year, but it was pretty tough in my years without a job, and honestly, there were times when she’d just buy me a ticket so I’d come visit. Things got tougher when she wasn’t able to drive anymore, because it meant having to get rides from my sister or other local friends.

I guess that’s all I have to say about my mother, for now, although I’m sure I’ll have more to share as I come to terms with the fact that she’s finally gone. I honestly thought I was more prepared for this than I actually am, but I also know that I need to keep working and writing, because I just have so much to do this week, and I can’t let myself just stop everything to mourn. There just doesn’t seem very much point to that. We’ll have a memorial for my mother sometime soon, I hope, where we can all get together and help each other heal. 

As I said at the very top of this post, I’m hoping my mother is finally happy and at peace and not struggling and suffering as much as she has been (both in reality but also in her mind), because it’s been difficult just knowing that she’s been so unhappy, and there’s nothing I or anyone else around us were able to do anything about that.