Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

These are focused on my mother's work as a Holocaust educator, and her early life in Germany and France before she came to the United States:

Holocaust Educational Trust: Eve Kugler BEM 1931 – 2025

Jewish News: "She lit up every room"

OPINION: How Eve Kugler changed the world

[Expect multiple posts about this over the next days and weeks, but I'm going to put more than one thing in a post, rather than make a couple of dozen short posts.]

My mother's cause of death was metastatic lung cancer; she'd been short of breath for a while but kept insisting nothing was really wrong. Then she fainted on her way to see her doctor on April 14, and her carer and one of her good friends decided to take her to the emergency room instead.

I wish I'd traveled sooner, but last Wednesday Mom told me that I shouldn't come right away, but wait until she was home from the hospital to visit because hospitals are boring. At that point they knew it was cancer, but were talking in terms of weeks or months, and what treatments to consider. Saturday morning (4/19) my brother said we should get there as soon as possible, and we were on a red-eye flight to London that evening. By the time I got there, my mother was a lot weaker, and not up for much in the way of conversation, but she was happy to see me, Adrian, and Cattitude. On the 21st the palliative care team said we should think about whether to send her home or to hospice. Mom wanted to go home, but said that she wanted whichever would get her out of the hospital sooner. Tuesday they told us "24 hours" and that she was too sick to be taken home or to a hospice facility. She died at 2:30 Wednesday morning, with my brother and his partner Linza sitting with her.

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Sitting shiva is supposed to be people coming to comfort the mourners. That's part of what happened last night, and it was valuable, but Mom's stepson Ralph asked if Mark or I would be willing to sit on Sunday as well, for the same of my mother's friends from March of the Living (a Holocaust memorial that Mom had been participating in since 2012) could pay a call, and I didn't feel up to that. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, and have my friends comfort me, not listen to more people I've never met tell me how wonderful my mother was. The group had a memorial service for her Wednesday night in Cracow, which was before the funeral.

My mother referred to Holocaust education as her "third career"; she volunteered once to talk about her and her family's experience, and the next time they needed a speaker they asked her again, and she saw work that needed doing and put a lot of time and attention into it. [Put in a link to one of the online obituaries?]

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I'm leaning on Adrian for guidance on how some of this can/should work, given that this needs to work for me, her, and Cattitude. Formally, my brother and I are the mourners, but Cattitude and Adrian both love and miss my mother, and she loved them. (Apparently several people who heard her talk about the three of us said things like "Eve was very...open-minded," which is true but misses that my mother loved them both.)

I just got off the phone with my brother, and don't need to dash off to London. This is the current situation:

There are treatment options for the cancer, but they know it's not curable: the goal is to get my mother more time, and make her more comfortable for however long that is. Mom definitely wants to fight this.

The immediate problem is that there's fluid around my mother's lungs. The pulmonologist described the problem, and said there are two possibilities for dealing with that, and he will come back tomorrow and ask Mom for a decision. Given the hospital schedule and what the choices are, if the first doesn't work she can have them do the other.

The pulmonologist doesn't think the oncologist will want to start treatment until after the fluid is drained, but the cardiologist will also be back tomorrow.

Given all this, I'm not planning to travel before Saturday [three days from now], and Sunday or Monday might be better in terms of both having my and my brother's visits overlap, and giving Mom company for longer. Mark will call me again once they talk to the specialists, to fill me in and maybe discuss travel plans based on what they learn. and decide, tomorrow. In the short term, knowing we're not traveling immediately is helping the three of ust deal with logistics like what to make for dinner, and Adrian picking up a prescription. It also means Cattitude can try to decompress a little, and wait until tomorrow to do laundry.

The other open question is how long I will want to stay in London. One possibility is that the three of us are all there there for a few days, after which they fly back to Boston and I stay longer.

My feet hurt because I decided to go for a walk with Adrian and Cattitude, even though one hip and my feet were hurting before we started, and even with an NSAID. I went anyway because I didn't think walking would make things much worse, and tomorrow's forecast is less appealing. It was sunny and 69F/20C outside, with a bright blue sky and delightful spring flowers, including two kinds of maple flowers, red and the underappreciated light green of Norway maple flowers.

We went to the supermarket, and bought ingredients for Passover-suitable lunches that we can make ahead of time. This morning/early afternoon was difficult because I slept later than usual, and Adrian and Cattitude got up later than that, and we didn't have plans for lunch, or useful leftovers.

That was on top of worrying about both my mother and the world situation. I was expecting to hear from my mother or brother by this afternoon, and haven't. I realize that bad news would be, and be treated as, more urgent than good or ambiguous, but I still worry. The time zone difference doesn't help any (it's five hours later in London than here).

My mother visited us for three days, arriving by train from Tuesday afternoon, and flying to New Orleans this afternoon. We mostly just visited quietly, except Wednesday we went out to dinner at Cafe Barada, in Cambridge, which has good Lebanese food and a good outdoor patio (a real patio, which has been there since long before the pandemic). It had been hot earlier in the day, but cooled off by the time we went to dinner.

adrian_turtle made chocolate souffles Monday night, and we liked them enough to immediately order proper straight-sided ramekins, so she could make puffier souffles. Those arrived yesterday, and Adrian used them to make more chocolate souffles, which we ate at about 6:00. Very good, but next time we should either make and eat the souffles after dinner, make savory souffles as dinner, or just have a large green salad for supper. Neither my mother nor I had much appetite for asparagus and baked fish a couple of hours after the souffles.

[more later, probably]

My mother was here at the end of February, after visiting my brother and his partner in New Orleans, during Mardi Gras.

It was a good visit, but cattitude, adrian_turtle and I all found it mentally tiring, which is why it's taken me a few days to write about it here.

My mother got here Saturday evening, and Adrian met her at the airport, and they took a cab home. We had soup for dinner, made the day before so we could eat when my mother got here. After supper, my mother was doing a little unpacking, and realized she'd left a backpack in the taxi.

( cut for length )

( masking )

My mother was just here for a couple of days. She got here Tuesday night, later than scheduled, and left Thursday afternoon.

In between, we mostly just talked, in varying combinations of people -- at least once, I wandered into the living room and found my mother, cattitude, and adrian_turtle talking. Wednesday morning, we all went for a long walk, so Mom could see the neighborhood, and enjoy the cool day, ending at Coolidge Corner, where we bought bagels and smoked salmon. When we set out, I expected to turn back fairly soon, and probably get home well before them. Instead, we all walked down Beacon Street, talking and looking around, and enjoying a comfortably warm morning.

This was a short visit, because we expected to still be somewhat frazzled from the move; her being here for only two days made sense because my mother was combining seeing us here, and my brother in New Orleans, with attending a wedding in Niagara Falls (postponed from 2020). We all want the next visit to be longer, but we will figure out how long, and when, sometime after everyone has caught their breath.

My mother left this afternoon--I went with her to the airport, where I asked for and got a gate pass so I could accompany her and have a little more time together. She could have managed on her own, but I know she benefited from having me there to tell her what people had just said.

It was a very good visit, though I am somewhat tired, and cattitude moreso. He and my mother both love, and like, each other, this was mostly about having had someone here from Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon.

On Wednesday, I got notarized photocopies of my birth certificate and passport, to accompany my (re)naturalization application. Most of the questions were straightforward, but she had me email one of her oldest friends to ask the name of the town where my mother and her family lived in France in 1939-40. There are also a couple of questions where we decided the right answer is for my mother to go to the German embassy in London with the not-quite-completed form and ask them what to put there--including at what point in the Nazi regime my mother and her family lost their citizenship.

My mother is visiting us for Thanksgiving, the first time we've seen her since February 2020.

I met Mom at the airport this afternoon. We took a cab home, and had a pleasant afternoon and evening of conversation. cattitude made braised rutabaga for supper, which she liked a lot. She went to bed a bit after nine, which is later than I was expecting (that's after 2 a.m. London time). Tomorrow's plan is to get to the grocery store in the morning, hopefully before it gets too crowded, and not do much else.

My mother has now had the COVID vaccine, and has an appointment for the second dose in three weeks.

She sent me articles from two UK Jewish publications, about her being almost certainly the first Holocaust survivor to receive the vaccine, both of which mention her work with the Holocaust Education Trust (which got the photo credit and presumably contacted the press):

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/shoah-survivor-89-among-first-to-be-given-covid-19-vaccine-1.509577

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-survivor-eve-kugler-among-first-to-get-covid-vaccine/

ETA: I have sent some of these comments to my mother, and our family and her friends.