Omi
Friday, 3 October 2008
The grandmother of my love died three days ago. She was 90 years old. Recently she stated having all kind of problems with her health, and it turned out she had a stomach tumor. My love always a had a loving relation with her “Omi”, so she decided to visit her the next weekend. But Wednesday her father called and said that her condition was growing worse quick, so my love went to Germany right away. The old woman died while she was on the highway.
For the next few days the whole family was together. I enjoyed it: all the people sharing their love, the absence of all the usual little irritations over unimportant details, the good food, the walks through the sunny town of Dusseldorf.
Because the old lady already lived in a hospital for a while, the family had planned this weekend to clean up her apartment in the senior flat, where she used to live, because she was not going to return there. Now this had to be done right after her death, which made it a strange operation.
The woman had no money or valuable possessions. In fact, almost all her stuff had to be thrown away. Only the photo’s and documents were saved, some people took a little souvenir, and we ended up with three boxes of dishes and coffee cups; the lady had insisted that her grand daughter would get this after her death. And I got a plastic bag with cassette tapes:
It was not easy to pick a song from Omi’s cassette collection for today’s Soundtrack, but here is Bruce Low with a German cover version of a 50’s hit:
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Only after I decided to record this song, I realised that the lyrics are very appropriate for this occasion. I mean, I remember that I listened to the original version several times while thinking that it is a far more interesting song when I imagine that it is not about a house, but about the body of a person. In all esoteric traditions the body is seen as a house.