Homage to a Broken Man The Life of J. Heinrich Arnold P e t e r M o m m s e n

02:05:00

1. Opa


The morning my grandfather died, I told everyone in my kindergarten
class, “Today Opa went to heaven!” My teacher, a longtime
friend of our family, started to cry, but her tears made no sense to
me. Who wouldn’t be proud to have a grandfather in heaven?
Of course, I would miss him. Opa and Oma lived in an apartment in our
house, and ever since Oma (my grandmother) had died two years before, he
had been sick and rarely left it. My mother, the seventh of their nine children,
is a doctor, and Opa had a buzzer by his bed for calling her at night. She spent
at least an hour or two in his room every day, sitting at his bedside while I
played on the floor. I loved bouncing on his bed and—when he let me—on
him. There was a sort of trapeze suspended above his pillow that he used for
pulling himself up. It was perfect for swinging on, and then letting go of, to
land on his stomach.
On some afternoons my mother wouldn’t let me use the trapeze. “Let Opa
rest,” she’d say, and then I’d have to content myself with just sitting next to
him. It was probably on one of those days that I noticed the little black cross
that hung on his wall. It fascinated me, though I didn’t know what I know
now: that he had made it as a boy for Tata, an aunt who had been like a second
mother to him.


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