My Mom, Barbara Buhlert (1942 – 2024)

Once again, this isn’t a post I wanted to write today or any other day. But as some of you may already know, my Mom died February 12, only four and a half months after my Dad.

Mom’s death wasn’t as unexpected and sudden as Dad’s, since she’d been dealing with various health issues since 2017 (and in retrospect, some issues popped up before that) and her condition badly declined in the past two years, starting with hip replacement surgery in 2022. Both diagnosis and surgery were delayed due to the pandemic and she never really recovered, but instead was worse off after the surgery. Before her hip replacement surgery, she’d been able to walk around with a walker inside the hourse, go to the bathroom, etc… Afterwards, she had to use a wheelchair and could only stand for short periods.

Since February 2022, my Mom experienced a succession of hospital stays. I think she’s been in every single Bremen hospital except Bremen-Nord, sometimes more than once. as well as several hospitals in the surrounding small towns and a stay in a physical therapy clinic. Since October 2023 alone, she’s racked up four hospital stays. And with every hospital stay, her condition deteriorated further. She never regained her ability to walk after the hip replacement surgery in 2022. After a succession of hospital stays in early 2023, she lost her ability to stand up for brief periods and had to move into a nursing home, because Dad and I couldn’t care for her at home anymore, in spite of home care nurses coming in every day. And after the latest round of hospital stays this winter, she wasn’t even able to sit in her wheelchair any longer, but instead lay in bed all day. Her eyesight had badly declined as well and I couldn’t even take her to the optician to get new glasses.

Considering that the hospital doctor, who diagnosed Mom was rheumatic vasculitis, told us around this time last year that she would probably die sooner rather than later, Mom held on for longer than expected. That said, the person she once was was long gone by end, though gimmers of her former personality occasionally shone through.

For example, during one of my last visits, I told her about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal – Mom has been a Hugo voter herself in the not too distant past – and mentioned that several finalists had been disqualified for reasons that were then still unknown. Mom has met Paul Weimer and she’s enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s work in the past, so I wasn’t surprised, when she remembered them. However, she also remembered who R.F. Kuang – whom she only saw once at the virtual 2020 Hugo ceremony, when Kuang won the Astounding Award – was, which surprised the heck out of me. At any rate, she muttered, “That silly little girl” (Mom was very much not impressed with R.F. Kuang’s acceptance speech), when I told her about R.F. Kuang being disqualified, which was probably the last time her former personality came through.

The last time I visited Mom, four days before she died, she barely opened her eyes, when I came into the room.  I didn’t stay very long, because she kept falling asleep. Normally, I would have visited her on the weekend, but I had caught a mild cold (which eventually developed into a fully blown bronchitis), so I stayed at home so as not to infect Mom or anybody else.

Early on Monday morning, I went to the grocery story and had just arrived on the parking lot, when my phone rang and a nurse from the care home told me that they’d found Mom dead in her bed that morning. Apparently, she’d had a mild fever the night before, but nothing indicated that she wouldn’t survive the night. I actually called up her doctor, who also signed the death certificate, what had caused her death in the end and he didn’t really know either beyond “a combination of issues”.

Because Mom had been steadily declining for several years, her death wasn’t as unexpected or shocking as Dad’s, though it still hurts. It also came at a really bad time for me, because I was extremely busy with translation work not to mention sick and had to deal with organising the funeral, cleaning out her room at the nursing home and administrative stuff on top of everything else. I also had to call up various relatives, neighbours and friends, some of whom I had already called about Dad four months, and tried to track down my Mom’s surviving cousins. And unlike Dad, Mom had a lot of cousins. Anyway, I reconnected with a bunch of family members I hadn’t seen in years and in one case never. I also learned that one of my second cousins is a big Star Trek fan and runs a Star Trek cooking channel on YouTube.

There are more photos of Mom than of Dad, including quite a few photos showing her as a kid and teenager. But the older photos are all pre-digital. I also don’t have a lot of very recent ones, because I didn’t want to document her decline. But here is a photo from Christmas 2020, where she was still herself and mostly well:

My Mom at Christmas 2020

And here’s Mom and Dad’s wedding photo from 1965:

Here are my parents at their wedding in 1965. My Mom has a marvelous beehive. The bouquet is quite interesting as well. According to my Mom, the dangling eight-shapes were two small myrtle wreaths, myrtle being the traditional choice for wedding wreaths and bouquets in Germany.

The nursing home where my Mom spent the last year has a memorial corner for inhabitant who have died. This is what it looked like when I cleared out Mom’s room.

Mom’s memorial service was yesterday. The actual funeral is next week, because the cemetery is on the far side of town – the grave is a family grave and has been there since 1913, while the family moved to other parts of town. A lot of the guests are elderly and so I didn’t want them to have to drive all over town. Besides, there was a public transport strike and a “climate strike” protest on the day of the memorial, which actually kept two guests from attending, because they couldn’t make it through the traffic.

The service was lovely and thankfully no surprise funeral crashers showed up to disrupt the proceedings speaking in the voice of Captain Kirk. It was a non-religious service at a funeral chapel. Here in Germany, you can hire speakers for non-religious memorial services and the funeral homes all have chapels.

This is what the chapel looked like. I had asked for donations to charity instead of floral arrangements, because I feel that spending a lot of money on flowers that will only wilt away is a waste. Besides, it looks lovely as it is:

Mom’s memorial service

After the service, there was the traditional post-funeral coffee, cake and sandwiches at a local restaurant. Sometimes, there’s also chicken soup, but I didn’t order that. Because a few people couldn’t attend, we had cake and sandwiches left over. My cousin, who’s headteacher of an elementary school, took the leftover cake to feed her teaching staff and I took the remaining sandwiches and gave them to the neighbours who couldn’t attend due to a covid infection.

This time around, I even remembered to take a photo of the assembled friends and family members. With Dad, I forgot.

I still have to get through the actual funeral next week. Regular blogging will resume eventually. And if I owe you an e-mail, I’m sorry and I’ll get back to you soon.