Munich, laundry, and a call home

This daytime train journey from Prague to Munich was relaxing. We ate our snacks, played cribbage and watched the countryside go by.

Munich was easy compared to Prague. The hotel (Hotel Europaischer Hof Munich) was just across the street from the station. We checked in, and made our way to the laundry mat for some much needed clothes washing. The afternoon was spent in the pedestrian zone. We ate pizza for lunch and dinner and I called home.

On the call, I learned my precious, 90-year-old grandmother was not recovering from a fall–and in fact she was declining rapidly. While my grandmother sounded like her usual chipper self on the phone that night, my mother told me that things were bad. My grandmother was not going to be able to return to her assisted-living apartment and would need to move out of it in the next 2 weeks. The family had already started packing up her place and selling her furniture.

Many thoughts scurried across my mind during that long, long-distance call…I saw the trinkets that lined her kitchen ledge, and the picture that had hung at the foot of her bed of the safe little red cottage in the valley surrounded by huge mountains. I always used to think I’d walk there someday…near that lonely little house that is oh so peaceful. I remembered something that I’d read on the el in Chicago…something about the difference between loneliness and solitude. I remembered the soft lamp glow of my grandmother’s cozy living room full of her beloved objects. I suddenly began to miss her already–and realized with a deep dread that she wouldn’t be there always for me to talk to. Was there something I needed to ask right now? Something really important for me to know? How could I tell her how much she meant to me? How could I keep her voice in my ears? Would she visit me in my dreams? She’s tired. Her friends have passed on. I don’t want her to suffer and I don’t want her to leave us. It was an intensely sad call, I was a million miles away. I cried for hours after, there in room 314 in Munich.

I wallowed in my thoughts and tried to focus on reading my book, Prague Farewell, over the next few days–neither of which were happy places to be. The book is the story of a Jewish Prague woman. During WWII, she and her family were taken to ghettos in Germany and later to concentration camps. She escaped months before the war ended and returned to Prague with no family and only a few friends who were brave enough to help her. She describes the slow conversion of Prague to communism and the horrors of watching a government go very very corrupt. Her husband is executed for treason, and once again she is left with no one willing to help her for fear that they too will be taken. It’s stunning in it’s loneliness.

It seemed that these thoughts of loneliness and loss would permeate the remainder of the trip. The next day we would head for Garmish-Partenkirchen up in the mountains.