or how Gitta‘s attitude to death is still influencing me.
To listen to this post in French, click below
I don’t write much in the blog these days, too lazy, but Ronni’s post, And When I Die…where she also announces the death of Olive Riley, the Australian blogger who died at age 108, got me to remember.
Gitta was scared, I think, of anything relating to death, to the point that she considered it bad luck to even talk about it.
If you spoke badly of a dead person, which I enjoyed doing, just to rile her a bit, she’d do her spitting three times act, to ward off bad things.
Pooh, pooh, pooh! she would go! You don’t speak evil of the dead!
If I sat on the floor, which in my youth I loved to do –wish I were nimble enough to do it–, that was bad too and she’d grumble until I got up. It took me years before I understood that to her, sitting on the floor was wrong because of the expected behaviour of religious Jews, who will not shave or sit on a chair for a certain amount of time after a death in the family.
She firmly believed that cemeteries were not places for children and I had to fight her to go to my beloved grandmother Lea‘s funeral, even though I was far from being a child when she died, since I had reached the ripe age of 16!
As for writing a will, the only reason that made her accept it was that she felt that thanks to that will, she could still control her children after her death.
I have told my daughter jokingly that when I die, she’d better make sure to keep my blogs online or else, my angry ghost would come and tickle her toes at night. I have even told her the general idea about my funeral –very general, mind you, as I don’t intend to organise anything myself. I hate organising parties, much less funeral parties!
And in a very remote corner of my limbic brain, I can hear Gitta whispering that it would indeed be bad luck to write a last post, while I am still alive.
Mais Maman, I won’t be able to do it once I’m dead!
and I can hear her say:
–Pooh, pooh, pooh! You don’t TALK about these things!
