It is hard to say, dear mother

Starts at 60 community writer Andris shares a powerful tale in the form of a letter to his mother.

It is hard to say how concentrated a poison needs to become before it no longer inoculates you against disease, but actually, causes it.

Tell me my bittersweet Mum, at what point was the balance tipped to make your bitterness become so dominant that I could no longer taste your sweetness under its avalanche?

Stumbling in the desert with parched lips, you conjure up a mirage of a cool spring. Desperately wanting to quench your thirst, you bend down to drink; but instead of fresh water, you scoop up pure poison.

I look at your black and white photo in Hungary. You are 24, a picture of sweetness. You stand arm intertwined with your mother on your left and on the other side of mother, your elder sister Cuni stands, the one who ends up in Sydney in1949; whom you, my sister and I joined in 1964.

Cuni also threads an arm into mother’s on one side and her other one, into your younger sister’s arm on her left side.

It is 1943, Lilafüred, a popular and pretty holiday resort in Hungary.

You have already been married since last year.

Your Mum who looks some 46 is smiling, without a clue, that next year she would be hauled to Auschwitz in a cattle waggon and be gassed.

Cuni is 26, already the mother of a four-year-old daughter.

Again, she has no idea that next year her husband would be killed in a labour camp for Jewish men and that she would defect with her daughter to Austria in the same year.

The youngest sister now at 22 does not know either that next year as Hungary is bombed, one of those bombs would take her life.

That is how in a single year, in that fatal 1944, you lose all the other three in this photo; your entire remaining family of origin!

Yet on this photo, all four of you look magnificent.

You stand in this park on a summer day, with poplar trees in the background, your spare arm bent with your fist on your hip; a luxurious fox fur tossed over your right shoulder, hanging down to your skirt. Your mother wears a white shirt with collars spreading over her smart coat, sisters Cuni and Olga, like every one of you, wear immaculately tailored expensive suits. All you four smile gently, the three girls casting a whimsical glance towards mother.

I wonder if this might have been the last photo of the four of you together.

Fast forward to your photo marked February 1977. You stand in a winter coat on a canal bridge in Venice. With a scarf wrapped around your hair, you are not smiling.

Rather, there is an atmosphere of Death in Venice, with you in mourning.

Incomplete mourning with its unresolved grief and loss can lead to a life of recurrent bitterness and venom spitting. Or to being like a hedgehog, with a tender underbelly that is permanently protected by vicious external spikes which you touch at your own peril. So how do you love a hedgehog? By tickling it gently, until it feels safe to reveal its soft side? Like a snail, enticed out of its shell? Like a snake charmer playing tranquillizing music to the cobra?

I wish I could have been such hedgehog whisperer, snail enticer and snake charmer in one!

Alas, I could rarely be so, but when I could, the reward was great: the yearned for, yet ever so elusive moments of intimacy with you!

How was/is your relationship with your mother?

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