My Mum
On board the Queen Elizabeth 1952
Photograph by brother Manfred Mueller
BEYOND THE LONELY BLUE
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Produced for the Geographies of Music, Geographers Who Play Music
The Journal of Media Geography
COGNITIVE HEARTH
I was there when my
mother said, "if I go into hospital this time, I don't
think I'm coming out." But she did, and in the midst of that
final exit, she taught me something about life I could have never
learned unless I would have been there when she left....when she
taught the right way to leave this planet.
CONDITIONS
My Prussian Mother modeled
to me something about perseverance. Giving up was not an option
for her. Perhaps it's in the blood? No I just can't be that bio-evolutionary
about it. More than likely it was a character derived from her
experience. A character that she began building near the end of
World War II. With her father at Mauthausen and with just her mother and brother
left, she took the first few steps off the farmstead in Tilsit, and did not quit walking for hundreds
of miles until she made it to Berlin, and ultimately those final
steps into hospital some fifty-five years later. Things may get
bad....but you just keep on going. You just don't quit. But hers
was a generation and an experience that never knew the technology
of a paper cup and what you did with it after it was used up.
Her's was a life where every moment of the voyage had value, and
the concept of commitment, no matter where the winds sent you,
was something never to be thrown away.
She was a mighty ship. Then one day, of no wish of here own, a
reef called cancer took hold of her and would not let her go.
And although the winds of this life somewhat shifted her course,
her jib was rigged for full sail...................
right to the very end of her race.
Thank you for listening.
Danke für das Hören.