My mother was the greatest inspiration of my life. Her faith and love shaped my character. After suffering from Alzheimer's for thirty years, she has finally been delivered from her suffering, but her legacy of love lives on.
My Mother, My Friend, My Teacher, My Inspiration
May 8, 1907 to October 6, 1998
Mutti was my best friend. For the first six years of my life, she was my only friend. I sat at her feet on my little stool while she sat by her sewing machine. As she created beautiful clothes for us and for other people, she introduced me to the characters of folk tales, to the heroes of the Bible, and to the Lord she loved and served. My favorite story was the one which told of the nine months of waiting and preparing for my arrival. After three boys, she felt assured that this baby would finally be a girl.
Mutti was careful how she chose names for her children. When telling me Bible stories, she always explained the meaning of names, and I came to consider them to be prophetic, because I saw the correlation between names and lives. For Mutti's first girl, the name had to be special. She wanted a girl who would be her friend, whom she would love unreservedly and whom she would trust. That is why she called me Traute (=troutie), the "beloved girl who would be a trusted friend to her." That is the meaning of the German adjective "traute." During the last years of her life, she paid me the highest compliment of my life when she told me that I was the only one of her children who had never lied to her. The name she had given me was prophetic.When I had just turned one year old, a dramatic event occurred which was to test Mutti's faith almost beyond endurance. After receiving all my prescribed vaccinations, my body reacted by going through the very diseases against which I had just been immunized, including whooping cough and scarlet fever, all of them at the same time. When the hospital saw that I had no chance to survive, they allowed my parents to take me home to die. My father called a homeopath who was known to have saved many lives, including his, but by the time he arrived, I had stopped breathing and my body was cold. He nevertheless undertook a treatment which he thought might revive me. He sent my parents out of the room to spare them the agony of the drama. He dipped me in very hot water and then wrapped me in cold towels. And the shock treatment did revive me.
Mutti has told me countless times about those anxious moments of waiting, talking to God, committing my life to him. She asked him to restore me to her only on the condition that I would live my life serving him. She gave God her consent to take me home at that time rather than allow me to live an ungodly life. That reminds me of the story of Hannah who dedicated Samuel to God's service. There is one big difference, though: Mutti did not hand me over to an ungodly high priest for spiritual training. She undertook it herself.
During the war, I lived in constant fear that one day my mother would be taken away like so many other citizens. I remember the Hitler Youth leaders coming to the house to pick up my brothers when they failed to attend the Hitler Youth meetings. They were compulsory for all teens and preteens. Mutti, however, had different views on the matter. No one was going to tell her what her boys should and should not attend. In spite of her miniature size, she managed to throw out those leaders repeatedly. I was proud of her and determined to follow in her footsteps.
On February 5, 1945, we fled our burning city in the easternmost region of Germany. American bombers were flying overhead and the shelling of the Russian army could be heard in the distance. We carried little more than the clothes on our backs. Mutti made sure that she saved two books which were to become my most valued treasures, a Luther Bible and a Singvöglein (little songbird), our Sunday school hymnal. During the time when no schools were in operation, I would sit on a footstool reading to Mutti page after page of that Bible and we would sing the songs from the Sunday school hymnal. For the next four years, that Bible was the only book I would read, and its content became food to my spirit and soul.
Mutti loved to sing. She taught all her children to love music. She also taught the women in church to sing to their own guitar accompaniment. Even when her memory failed, she had no problem singing the Lord's praises from memory. When she was no longer able to find her reading glasses, she would sit by the piano, and to her amazement, she was able, for the first time in her life, to play all her favorite hymns by ear. That was the Lord's special gift to her, she told me.
She loved the concerts in which I was singing and always made sure that everyone around her recognized me as her daughter. She was never content just to listen. She would join us in the choruses of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, of his St. Matthew Passion, or of Haydn's Creation. None of the other concert-goers complained about her singing. Maybe they received a special blessing that day.
And she knew how to pray! When she attended our community Bible studies, she was no longer able to follow the discussions. Her hearing loss made communication difficult, and her memory loss restricted communication to her mother tongue, but she loved to be with the children who attended the Bible study. She would sing with and for them. As the children would line up to hug her one by one, she would take them in her arms and pray for them. No one ever told her what to pray for, but she would invariably cover the needs in every life. She was truly praying in the Spirit.
Mutti is no longer praying. She is standing in the presence of the Lord to whom she was talking in her prayers. But she is still singing. And she is walking around glory shaking hands with all the new saints she is meeting for the first time. She is also hugging all the saints she knew here on earth. Actually, she isn't walking. She is running. When she was well, she never had time to walk. She was always running.
When I go home to be with the Lord, I know who will come running to meet me - my Mutti. First she will give me a big hug, and then she will grab my hand and drag me to meet the Lord, the same Jesus to whom she introduced me so many years ago.
I grieved for my mother for the 30 long years in which I saw her personality deteriorate from the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. I am done grieving. Now I rejoice with her. She is whole again.
