Micky’s “Good” Death

The night before my stepmother Micky (Anders) Petschauer died, she appeared as if in a haze, and very weak. The cancer at the left side of her throat was beginning to close off her ability to eat and drink. She was partially propped up and visibly uncomfortable. In spite of these difficulties, her mind was somehow alert, even if slowed by the exhaustion from the month-long struggle with being in bed and the disease.

We prodded her to drink at least a little bit of water and accept a few spoonfuls of yogurt. She replied to my “One cannot live without food and water,” with a faint “Who wants to live?” All the same, she agreed to the yogurt, and I prepared to feed her from a plastic container, the kind that most of us have held in our hands. The difference was that this container had Mozart’s face on one side, this being the Mozart year and the senior facility most likely having bought it for a reasonable price in nearby Austria. She looked on as I partially filled the spoon. To try to bring a bit of hu mor into this unique situation, I reminded her that the ashes of the famous Austrian composer were not in the container. A faint smile flashed across her face, like those of the good old days, and she asked me to turn the container toward her. She made it clear that she wanted to read the ingredients. As I turned the container, she opened her eyes wide and knowingly, as if to say, “I get you, buddy; you are trying to trick me.”

She could not read the ingredients without her glasses, but she had made her point. That March evening, my wife Joni and I did not know that this was the last time either of us would see our Micky alive, let alone feed her. This was our last direct communication, and so this moment lingers on as one of the best memories of her and our relationship with her. The next morning the woman we knew so well lay stretched out in her bed, having died about a half hour before the staff called us into the room. In her death, she seemed alive, almost as if asleep. We heard later that our impression was correct. She had fallen asleep after one of the nurses had woken her for a morning swallow of water.

It had been a difficult few months for Micky, but usually she retained her sense of humor and rarely complained about pain. As she put it, “I cannot stand pain, I want to die before it starts.” Luckily for her, her wish came true.

Thankfully, good memories can fill our minds and wipe away the bad. For about two years, until the mid-October before she died in March, Micky was angry with me over something Joni and I still do not understand. Maybe she projected the anger about her illness onto me, or she thought that we would not be there for her in the last months and days of her life. But, just as quickly as the anger had started, it dissipated, and our relationship returned to “normal.”

For years, “normal” meant sitting in the evening over a glass of wine around her living/ dining room table and reminiscing about the past and contemplating concerns of the present. In the last months of her life, normal meant bringing her a red rose and “putting on her face” every day we visited her in the fantastic community home for seniors provided by her community. Even on her last day, Micky was visibly grateful that Joni made her up and that she had a new rose. It also meant

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sitting with her in her room, and off and on trying to talk about the outside world. During her short stay in a nearby hospital two weeks before she died, normal meant driving through the Bavarian winter and then looking out with her over a pristine snowy landscape; yes, with horses.

Micky was a beautiful woman, in the style of Doris Day, for those who recall this once famous idol. She started out as an actress just before WWII, continued with this favorite activity during it, and struggled on with it shortly after this massive catastrophe. My stepmother loved to reflect about her time in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) where she acted with a small troupe at first for the townspeople and later for the German soldiers and officers who were stationed in it and nearby. She was barely in her early twenties, and this was one the most exhilarating stages of her life. She had a near-photographic memory that enabled her to read her roles one time and “speak them” without fail during the first run on stage. Her favorite role, by the way, was Faust’s Gretchen. Her uncanny ability to recall text left lots of time for fun; “older” men surrounded her with adulation, wined and dined her, and when the Soviet front neared and their artillery already shook the ground, they whisked her out of town.

With many of Nürnberg’s playhouses collapsing after the war, acting disappeared for Micky as a genuine professional option; although she tried to stay with it, she usually held down secretarial jobs. Oddly and fortuitously, my father arranged for one of her last stints. He schemed for months to have an actress play the female roles that he usually took on for the small acting group in the American, later Bavarian, prisoner of war camp then outside of Nürnberg. So, in the fall of 1947 the German prisoners of war persuaded the camp administration to advertise for an actress. When Micky appeared, my father, who had a year earlier been presented with divorce papers by my mother, fell head over heels in love. At first, she did not want to have anything to do with “the old man,” but he persisted.

Late in 1948, she had her first break; she became an announcer with Bavarian Radio. The second break came in the mid-1950s when she was called to the station’s headquarters in Munich and for the next twenty years announced, live, its Sun day concerts. Once more, Micky was in her element; she met everyone from Pavarotti to Carreras and from Caterina Valente to Placido Domingo.

Her reminiscences of that time were total fun and brought us into a very different world. The following was one of her favorite stories. For one Sunday, she made herself a black dress (yes, she made her own outfits in the fifties) that exposed her entire back and stopped just above the famous carpenter’s crack. The orchestra, mostly men, went wild. The audience had of course no clue about the reason for the enthusiasm. They only understood when Micky turned to them as she exited with the announcement of the last song; many, many years later, we could still hear the applause.

In the meantime, my father had been released in 1948, and she helped him back onto his feet. Although he was twelve years older than she, they married in 1954. During his long struggle with diabetes she helped as well, and after his death in 1977, she did not remarry. In one rather open moment, Micky said about this decision: “What would I do with an old man? Nurse him to the grave? No way; at least I knew your father for a long time.” She did not want to tempt her luck with catching a younger man at what she perceived to be the ripe age of fifty-eight.

Micky fell in her apartment two years before her death; she broke her clavicle and, because of her brittle bones, the doctors were not able to return her arm to full mobility. She rebelled and complained, but with time she accepted this limitation. She also adjusted well to the facility in which her best friend placed her after an attempt to manage alone in her apartment. For the most part, she recalled the good times of her youth and middle years and reflected with considerable satisfaction that she had the wisdom already then to enjoy them. In her estimation, most people she knew were not as fortunate as she.

Micky was a modern German, even a modern European woman. But oddly, she did not think much of feminists. To her mind she succeeded as a woman before they came along, and “in my own way…We are smarter than they, die Männer [the men].” She was modern in that she held a very responsible job, kept up with the latest news by reading most parts of Munich’s extensive South German newspaper every day, read the latest nov-

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els and biographies, debated with my father and anyone else about any and all issues, and hiked every mountain in the region. At her death, their library contained over 1,000 books and at least 100 playbooks.

During her stay in the hospital, we brought her the newspaper one afternoon, and she promptly had us sit her up in her bed so she could read it. After a few moments, she shook her head, smiling. The paper was upside down. When we turned it, “the print has become too small…Never mind,” she added, “tell me what’s in it.”

A team of very competent doctors in this hospital discovered the very aggressive cancer. With the clear winter sunshine coming through the window, her doctor, a very pleasant man who speaks English fluently, wanted to know from us: “Do you think we should operate? We can do it, no problem; but I don’t know if an intrusion will do much for her quality of life or her life expectancy.” She and we were stunned by the news, but her “No” came fairly quickly. Without much emotion, she followed up that she wanted to die and not be in misery.

Aside from her eagerness not to be in pain and to avoid any extension of her not-particularly-pleasant life, we have felt since then that she was making it easier for us to accept the inevitable. We also think that her final days and moments were as well done as the life she had led before then: absolutely charming, tough and yet accommodating, intelligent and yet never haughty, goal-oriented and yet flexible, full of humor and yet understanding of herself and those around her.

Micky died on March 17, 2006, and her ashes are interred in the new graveyard of the Bavarian state which provided such good services in her final years.

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