Teaching History Matters

My mom passed away twenty years ago this morning.

She struggled with early onset Alzheimers for about twenty years. It was so hard to witness the decline, but I have to say that I think she was happy most of that time. She was beloved by the assisted living, and later the nursing home staff who cared for her at the end. She was gentle and sweet, and in her prime as the head school nurse teacher in her school district, no pushover when it came to advocating for her kids to those in power who stood in the way of affording them maximum attention and services. My sister and I sat with her in the wee hours after we learned she was no longer taking food. Exhausted, we headed home for a break around 2am that morning. We got the call about an hour later that she passed at 2:45, after we had left. I hardly remember her funeral, and it took years to get over it. A lot of anger to process. I’m not sure I’m over it yet, but there have been many signs and reminders that she is still with me.

Take this morning, for instance.

I woke up from a dream around 2:30 AM, and got up to walk to the bathroom. I noted the time, thinking of Mom. Actually I was doing some meta thinking—thinking about thinking of Mom—like, why did I wake up at this moment? The exact timing of her passing to the minutes twenty years on? Of course she’s been on my mind, but…

So I was walking by an antique low wattage lamp that remains on 24/7 near some stairs to light the path. Literally just as I passed it, behind my back, it started to flicker wildly, as some of these newfangled energy saving bulbs are apt to do when they are nearing the end, though it hasn’t ever done it before, and is not doing it now over 12 hours later. It sits on a desk my father built, alongside a bunch of my mom’s oversized art books. She loved the Impressionist painters. She loved to travel, frequently with my wife, who became her best friend and companion. I stopped in my tracks, and I thought, well, that’s weirdly appropriate.

It’s been quite a summer. First, the bedside clock at camp stopped at quarter to three. My father also died at that time, in the afternoon, 25 years ago this past August. Then the battery operated bedside clock here at home stopped at the same clock hour about a week later.

So when the exact moment rolled around again this morning, as I was returning to bed, just at the time Mom passed 20 years ago, I took this other pic. I kid you not, literally as I took it, the power to the whole house flickered, the bedside lamp, the night light, etc.

I am all alone in this big house. The kids have left the nest, and  Laura is traveling abroad, but I’m not creeped out. I’m comforted. If your parents were beloved and are no longer with us, I hope you are comforted by their presence yourself from time to time. For me, I am constantly reminded of my parents near me when I glance at a clock face and, ‘by chance’, it’s a quarter to three. It seems to be happening more frequently as I get on, but it’s all good.

Anyway, I’m no stranger to the power of love transcending time and space. It’s all over my book, A Train Near Magdeburg. There are no coincidences, and I’ll share an experience I wrote about in a previous post that helps to illustrate that point, once again. The 2017 post was titled, “Hope To See You In California.” Thanks for reading.

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My second book, A Train Near Magdeburg, the one on the death train and my journey as a teacher in discovering and retracing the miracles in reuniting Holocaust survivors with their American soldier liberators, has had mostly positive reviews. Then recently someone posted how he found himself resenting that I had clumsily inserted my own experiences into an otherwise tremendous story. (Fair enough—but ‘resentment’?) That, coupled with a resurgence of antisemitism and the other stuff that bad dreams are made of sends a certain chill up this writer’s—this historian’s—spine.

Now if one really read, and ‘got’ the point of my second book, it’s about miracles and goodness and common human decency and humanity; about a triumph of the power of good and love over evil, against crazy odds; about the lessons and the values which we should hold firm to in a world filled with pain and destruction, deception and deceit. But some days it is hard to see the good, and the world lately frankly leaves me feeling rather adrift; I wonder if it all is pointless.

And then, out of the blue, comes the quiet reminder…

Later this week I got an email from a new fan in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have never met or heard of each other until he bought my books. He loved them, and then felt compelled to reach out to me (which I invite—it’s matthew@teachinghistorymatters.com). He wrote that as he neared the end of the book, he realized that his wife was from the area where I live and write about.
We went back and forth. Later on a whim he reached up on the bookshelf in his basement office and dusted off his wife’s high school yearbook. He opened it up, and sent me this:

IT’S MY MOM.

Vintage 1975, autographing his wife’s graduating yearbook… turns out my mom was the school nurse teacher at his wife’s school, now nearly a continent away. Kim was heading out west after graduation, and my mother was going to head there to visit her brother and his family in California that summer. Neither I nor my siblings had ever seen this photo before; I can tell by her expression that Mom is laughing with the photographer and is insisting that he get the shot over with!

So now, on a dark day, my mother is speaking to me. She was taken from us in 2005, just before the Holocaust survivors I write about found me in 2006 and entered my life and the lives of the soldiers who freed them in such a profound way. My mother reaches out  to remind me that there is still good in the world.

Maybe that reviewer could care less, but my mom will always be a part of the story—MY story. Thanks, William, for sending it to me. And thanks Ma, for being there for me again.