What do you write when someone you loved more dearly than anything in the world is suddenly not there anymore? How do you start? I don’t know, I honestly don’t. But given the events of three weeks ago, I am now confronted with this. Three weeks ago, on June 28th 2017, my mom, Susanne Milde, passed away in the early hours of morning, following a brief stint in hospital, and a much much longer fight against cancer.
To say that it was a shock is quite frankly the understatement of the year. For as long as I can remember, she had been the pillar of stability, if not quite calm, in the family. Be it juggling a job in Hamburg with an hour-long commute along back roads and raising a kid in Northern Germany, shepherding said kid through the teenage years in Prague and Austria, or flying all over Europe and the world while keeping the company office in Frankfurt purring, she had always seemed to make it look easy. And no matter how chaotic things got, they were certainly never boring.
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| Family pictures on a harbour tug are certainly not common, not even during events like the Hamburg Harbour Day 1988... |
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| ...but then again, we never were just an ordinary family, not least thanks to my mom. |
The first inkling that my life might be a bit “different” came in 1993, when the call came to move to Prague in the then newly independent Czech Republic. All of a sudden, we were in a strange land, at once in an ancient city and a young country still trying to find its footing. What followed were three and a half incredible, exciting, surreal and formative years, years where once again my mom turned out to be the anchor in all that chaos, climbing the ranks at work, while doing her best to keep a teenage boy on the straight and narrow back home, which was not always an easy job, you can be sure of that. I guess it must have been quite a relief when I was shoved off to boarding school in Austria in 1997 for another five years of futile attempts at actually getting an education. Still, she had to juggle yet another series of jobs, first in Prague, and then in the equally amazing city of Heidelberg back in Germany. As interesting as it was, the real madness started a few years later, shortly after the turn of the millennium, when she joined a small Finnish software company called Trema. Between assembling shelves and laying network cables in the new company office in Frankfurt, and carting around dozens of flatscreen monitors in their decrepit Opel, my parents literally built the Trema office in Frankfurt from the ground up.
Not that she would see much of the office at times, mind you. As troubleshooter extraordinaire, she would spend weeks, or even months away from home, and soon knew cities like Helsinki, Prague (of course) Nice or Stockholm (IIRC) just as well as her then home Frankfurt. And then there was Boston. She was originally sent over to sort out a few issues in the accounting department of her employer over there. It was supposed to last 1-2 weeks. It ended up taking three months. Other episodes would lead to her literally not seeing a forest because of all the trees during a team night out at work. It was during these turbulent years that I began to appreciate just what a powerhouse she was at work, as most of my first summer jobs were at Trema Frankfurt. It was her who guided me to my first full-time job when my last attempt at completing secondary education failed. It was mostly her who got me to the US Army bases in Hanau at ungodly hours when I was working there as an armed security guard. And it was her whom I turned to for advice when my own job at DHL and Deutsche Post began morphing into my first attempts at leadership. She was also there in the audience when I finally grew my stage legs with productions like Jesus Christ Superstar or Fiddler on the Roof.
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| When I emigrated to Ireland in 2012, something my mother had triggered... |
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| ...she and my dad were there to see me off. Although to be honest, I'm not quite sure what"s going on in that picture. But then again, my parents never took themselves too seriously. |
It was her tipoff to a headhunter that lead to me landing a job at Apple, which would actually see me realise my own dream of moving, living, and working abroad, and even the distance between Cork and Speyer did nothing to dampen our contact with each other. We would often talk daily, each of us venting our frustrations at work and giving the other advice. By this time, her cancer had become apparent, but even that did not slow her down initially. Apart from throwing herself into her new job at iSoft, which would later morph into iSolutions, she continued to jet around the globe, be it a visit to Dubai and Fujairah, or the semi-regular trips to Calgary or indeed Ireland, even visiting me here in Cork a few times.
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| Even in later years, when cancer had already its toll, my parents loved Ireland. Whether near Cork in 2013... |
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| ...or on the beach at Enniscrone, Co. Mayo, in 2015, my mother wouldn't let cancer slow her down. |
In all of this, it would be unfair to attribute all of this to my mom alone. Her husband, my father was the other part of what can only be described as a congenial duo. Meeting in Hamburg in the early 1970s, their relationship was as deep and heartfelt as few are nowadays, and has certainly stood the test of time. He was always at her side, from Hamburg all the way up to Speyer. You almost couldn’t separate one from the other. Even up to the end of May 2017, when I last visited them both, you could still see the sparks flying between them. Although, in fairness, some sparks were bound to fly for other reasons, when two characters of that magnitude meet.
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| It is kind of fitting that our last trip together let us to the S.S. Rotterdam, a retired ocean liner moored in Rotterdam. Not only is it halfway between Cork and Speyer, there's always been a strong affection for all matters maritime in my family. |
It is still hard to write about my mom in the past tense. I still feel like she’s the one who is going to answer the phone when I call home after a day at work, and her messages in iMessage and Gmail continue to be at the top of my conversations. I owe her everything. Together with my dad, she opened up the world to me, helped me take my first steps on this road of life. All the tools I have to deal with the challenges that are sure to come my way, I owe to her, and I know that I’ll be able to continue to the end of my journey even without her. But damn, the road has just gotten a lot more lonely.
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