Mum, where are you now?

I have no idea.

But wherever you are Mum, I wish I could nominate you posthumously for a Nobel Prize for ‘Endurance’.

The words, uttered by Wilson to Scott, in Douglas Stewart’s ‘The Fire On The Snow’ ring true about you:

‘We dreamed, we so nearly triumphed, we were defeated
As every man in some great or humble way
Dreams, and nearly triumphs, and is always defeated,
And then, as we did, triumphs again in endurance.
Triumph is nothing; defeat is nothing; life is
Endurance; and afterwards death. And whatever death is,
The endurance remains like a fire, a sculpture, a mountain
To hearten our children. I tell you,
Such a struggle as ours is living; it lives after death
Purely, like flame, a thing burning and perfect.’

Yes Mum, your ability to endure all the adversities that life hurled at you was no less than extraordinary. As your offspring, this heartens me now, to no end.

However, curiously, it is only now, at the age of seventy, thirty two years after your death, that it heartens me truly.

I took your ability to survive for granted while you were alive.

But your endurance outlived you and at last I sense it as a ‘flame … burning and perfect.’

As a child, I was like the Hungarian poet, Atilla József, in his poem, written about his hard working, ‘washing woman’ mother: 

‘To Mum’
‘I was still innocent; I screamed, I threw tantrums:
“Leave the swollen washings to others, take me to the loft”.
I would not whinge now, but it is too late.
Now I see what giant she was.
Her grey hair is blowing in the sky
Dissolving blue in the sky’s blue water.’

There was only on one occasion that you cracked Mum and tried to take your life.

It was shortly after the Second World War.

Unlike your Mother and your younger sister, You survived the war, hiding for a year from the Nazis, on different locations than your husband’s. The fascists were keen to find and kill both of you just because you happened to be Jews.

But what you were able to prevent your hunters from doing to you, namely that they would gas you in a concentration camp, you set out to do to yourself in a moment of despair.

Had my father not found you and pulled your head out of the gas oven, neither of us would have been around.

Enough was enough for you then. You lost all your family of origin during the war; your daughter was separated from you for a whole year while she was with the Carmelite Nuns from the age of three months after you gave birth to her in January 1944. And when you regained her, my paternal grandmother took her away from you for five more years until she went to school despite your protest to your husband that he should not allow this to happen.

In early 1945 the German fascists were driven out of Hungary by the communist Soviet troops. But our ‘liberators’ raped you.

That was the final straw for you.

Yet, after Dad spared your life, you bounced back and never again tried to take your life again, even though sometimes you might have wondered what was the point of carrying on?

But you persevered and at the first Christmas in peace, after reuniting with your husband after the war, you conceived me and carried me to full term, even though the future looked bleak in the devastated and now again tyrannised Hungary.

Throughout my childhood, I took it for granted that I had a good life and I never really grasped, just how much you, would have had to struggle to ensure this.

Did you come to value your parents more in adulthood, after you found out from experience how hard parenting can be?