“Stay in this moment” is advised in every yoga class, it’s modern mindfulness babble for those trying to get through the rush hour routine. For the narrator in Helga Schubert’s new book “The Today” it is the motto of life. The 83-year-old narrator takes care of her 96-year-old husband, who has severe dementia, and enjoys every second together.
You read that right. She is happy about every second, although in these seconds there are also urinary catheters torn out, wheelchairs overturned, dozens of pills a day, but sometimes no mutual recognition. Better to die, say many for whom death is still a few decades away. When people are asked how they imagine their own death to be, most say: quick, painless. I prefer to just tip over. Or fall asleep and never wake up again.
No one wants to become ill and in need of care, or “wasting away” at the end of life, as it is often said, a word that you will not find in Schubert’s book. And yet, for the vast majority of people, this is exactly what happens at the end of life. Dealing with it is therefore not the silliest idea and reading “The Today” is not the silliest start.
The narrator is, easily recognizable, Helga Schubert herself, who also looks after her husband in real life, the painter and psychology professor Johannes Helm. In the book his name is Derden, which means “the one I love”. Then she describes her day, her days, broken down into “cream yoghurt in the shade, a blackbird sings, silence”. Such are the last little joys that her husband still has left, but Helga Schubert writes tenderly about it: “So a life can breathe out after all.”
Helga Schubert: Today. A Book of Hours of Love. Dtv, Munich 2023. 272 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Dtv)
On closer inspection, it’s a tough book that gives you a jaw-dropping punch between the soft, loving, poetic sentences. Each page reminds you: you won’t just drop dead either, most likely. You, too, will have to be swaddled in the last years of your life and will no longer recognize anyone, you will hallucinate and drool, be helpless and confused.
Can one then love such a life? To be loved back by such a being? The narrator is asked that by so many people that at some point you ask yourself the same thing. When does the price become too high, when are you too old, when does the pain and effort outweigh love, and was it ever love when that eventually happens?
Schubert also answers these questions with many flashbacks to their life together, getting to know each other at the chair of psychology, life together in the GDR, which she did not leave even then for the sake of him, for the sake of love. Today she gets involved again in his world, which is not hers, gets confused (“Who knows, maybe I’m made up of three women. Maybe he just realized that. Only I didn’t know it yet.”) And celebrates Christmas in February, because he thinks it’s December 24th and would be sad otherwise. When she digitally attends a meeting of the writers’ association PEN, Derden drives down the drive in a wheelchair, falls over, injures herself, is confused.
Schubert does not leave out the bitter, sad, hard moments of care
It’s also irritating that a woman writes so bluntly how much she gave up for her husband, and at the same time how happy life together still makes her, even if it’s one that many people no longer consider to be. A fundamental dilemma of writing and public debate is that those who do and participate often only have indirect knowledge. Who cares, does not write, does not speak – no time for something like that.
Helga Schubert is an exception. She has also told the story that “The Today Day” tells – partly with the same wording – in many interviews in recent years that she gave after she won the Bachmann Prize at the age of 80. Only since then has she really become known to the West German public, although she has been writing and publishing novels for many decades.
No matter how much love there is (even in the subtitle, which reads “A Book of Love”), Schubert does not omit the bitter, sad, hard moments that caring for a seriously ill person entails: people who suggest giving the man morphine or waking him up in the morning with a cold washcloth on his face; the impossibility of going away because there is no one who can replace her in the care; her inner prohibition to think about the advantages of his approaching death.
Their very belief forbids the thought of ending another life
Schubert’s story is strongest when she sticks to the details, describes her everyday life in minute detail and puts her feelings about it on paper. Strange, on the other hand, is the encounter with other dying people and those caring for them. One moment you were so incredibly close to Derden and the narrator, then there is a chapter about the death of a man in 1994, whose wife killed himself shortly afterwards, and yes, this episode is probably intended to underline again how strong a bond there is between two people can be. But that has long since been understood there.
Helga Schubert prefaced the book with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew. She’s a believer, so any thought of ending another life, even if it’s just a little less devotion, is completely off-limits for her. There it says: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about its own. It is enough that each day has its own plague.” Living in the moment at all times, concentrating on the sun and creamy yogurt, may be the only way to endure her situation.
