A life not lived?

“ A Life not lived” was the caption my son put under a photo of my mother, Marlene.
Yet, her life had been one of heroic struggles. She was born in Austria, in1936, between the two wars. When she was just two, her father was recruited again, leaving a mother who was young, scared, and struggling to make ends meet. Punishments were meted out often and harshly, and got even more severe after a little boy was born.

The father, who had undergone inhumane suffering in Russia, arrived back home years later, having walked thousands of kilometers. He could not recognize the boy as his own and proceeded to make family life even more difficult.

When Marlene was 13, she crossed the street hand in hand with her mother, when a drunk French corporal ran her mother over with his car. He did not even stop the car, leaving my mother with the trauma of witnessing her mother’s wounds and last agonizing breaths. Her father was in no position to care for the two children, and put them in the care of the deceased mother’s grandparents, Maria and Sepp Wurm, who lived in a town about 50 km away from the rural world the children knew.

Life could have taken a turn for the better, since food at least was not in as short supply as it had been earlier. The grandparents had a little garden that provided some sorely needed supplies. The problem was just that Grandmother Wurm adored the boy, while the girl that grew more beautiful with the years could do nothing to please her. She was denied food for speaking unbidden. She was locked out into the cold and dark stairwell for arriving a few minutes late from a date.

At the age of 18, Marlene was swept off her feet by a dashing young teacher. She soon found herself pregnant, having never been told about the “facts of life”, and a wedding was organized as soon as the fact was established. I was a “6 month preemie”, born just 6 months after the wedding.

The two newlyweds moved away from the grandmother and found lodgings with a family outside town. Rupert taught at the local school and played patriotic and dance music with several bands to augment his salary. In the summers, as more and more tourists found their way to Austria, Marlene worked in a hotel in Walchsee, in those days a day’s journey from home. Willing and cash-strapped neighbors minded the child, and later the three children, throughout the summer seasons.

After several years of working hard and saving every shilling, the pair took a credit and started building a home of their own. But not just any home. It turned into a Pension, a forerunner of today’s hotels. With the help of one untrained young lady, who came from a family of 16 children, my mother cooked, cleaned, and ran the hotel, and cared for three children and a demanding husband, seven days a week, from waking to falling asleep.

Migraines were soon an unwelcome, yet ignored companion. Illness was not an option, neither injuries like deep gashes or broken bones. “The show had to go on.” The inner critic and can-do attitude made her work without respite in each successive stage of extension of the hotel. When my mother was not cooking, shopping, running the hotel, she was wall-papering, painting, working with the crews. Yet appreciation did not follow. The marriage crumbled due to exhaustion and the chauvinistic tendencies of her mate.


Criticism grew sharper, infidelities were added to  humiliations, and verbal altercations peppered the couple’s exchanges.

The children saw, learned, and practiced their emerging powers on the one they perceived the weakest.  Finally the demand by her husband, “Sign this credit note” ended in a helpless thrashing with a shoe, after which I had to drive my father to the hospital for stitches. Financial pressures exacerbated the misery of the two, while the face towards the outside, the guests and the villagers, was kept serene.

With the next economic downturn, the credits at the bank were called, and the hotel had to be sold. A life’s work gone. Bankruptcy. The children had moved out by then. The scorn of the villagers and the shame towards the creditors... the end of the rope had been reached. At the age of 45 my mother demanded a divorce. In her pride she accepted not even the alimony that was rightfully hers, but chose to fend for herself, famously uttering a few choice epithets to her ex in front of the judge. “My life is over” she confided in me after it was all done.

For several years she ran a mountain retreat, a very basic operation, that was deserted throughout many months and busier than a bee hive on a warm summer’s day. Heating as well as cooking were done with a fire in a stove. For a time her brother, who had spent his life as a truck driver and sacrificed the health of his spine for it,  joined her in the running of the restaurant. But his choleric character and the amount he drank were not conducive to peaceful times.

Then one of her children suffered through a long bout of depression. She was always available to visit, help out, and share the misery. She gave love in the best way she knew.

Within a few years my mother had paid back every penny she owed from the bankruptcy.
Then the owner of the mountain retreat bilked her badly, and my mother decided to retire. She was in her 60ies, very lonely, and isolated. Making and maintaining friends was not a luxury she had ever learned nor had had the time for. She moved into a tiny room and kept to herself. She gradually stopped eating. She failed to heat her apartment. After a nasty verbal attack by a sales lady in the grocery store she did not even venture outside any more.

Cigarettes, playing cards and beer (and the “good pieces of advice” her children gave her on their infrequent visits) became her companions. Eat more, heat your place, clean it up, see friends, invite card playing friends, go out, read this, follow that... we children knew exactly how to handle the situation.

In truth, my mother was done with life. She saw no reason to prolong it. She found no enjoyment in comforts, nice things, or vacations. What she would have enjoyed was time with her children, but they were either too far away or too busy. Love had never been freely given to her, and, not having experienced it, she was not free to give it. A child of the war... war between countries as well as war between partners.

If a life is measured in the hardships endured, the hours worked, the dreams abandoned, businesses built or humiliations borne, then my mother was a hero. On the other hand, if the measure is love given or received, then, maybe, her life really was not lived.

Sadly, we never really knew the woman. At the age of 72 she quietly passed away in an assisted living facility she was moved to, almost against her will, two years earlier.