2023-06-29 14:21:54
HomeCulture”Gerd is in the hospital”: Did we challenge fate?
Suddenly the father-in-law has to go to the hospital. And you realize that you haven’t looked closely for years.
André Mielke
06/27/2023 | updated on 06/29/2023 – 12:21 p.m
And suddenly the father-in-law is in the hospital.Sylvio Dittrich/imago
The phone rang at five in the morning: Monika, the mother-in-law. “Gerd is in the hospital,” she sobbed. The father-in-law, possibly heart attack. Since then my wife has been on the coast to support her parents. It wasn’t the pump, it was cancer, just prior to bowel obstruction.
Both are almost 80. Gerd suffers from previous illnesses. Monika seems extremely vital, but is demented. She is constantly visited by dead relatives. She uncovers a few more plates for them. Finally she called to ask if we didn’t know where her little Gerd was. Don’t worry, he said reassuringly from behind, he was there after all. No, Monika whimpered, that’s not mine, it’s a stranger’s man.
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We kept asking him if he could still do it or if we should seek help. – Nonsense, he’ll manage that. Our visits raised doubts, but Gerd blocked: “Everything is okay.” Well, if he says so; as a well-established team, like Latsch and Bommel, they might make ends meet. We told ourselves that without believing it. It may be that Gerd wanted to spare us and sometimes only endured his wailing wife wandering around the terraced house by taking out the hearing aid and turning the television on loud. In any case, my wife now knows how it really is. In Heinz Rudolf Kunze’s words: We’ve suppressed come hell or high water. Then he came and we don’t know what to do next.
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We must have missed something. We should have been better prepared. On the other hand, this happens to millions of people every day. Even entire societies. You let fate take you. Until it strikes. The age tree comes to mind: The baby boomers are now retiring so massively that soon, I distort slightly, a 29-year-old Lidl cashier should make it possible for two pensioners to get by. For as long as anyone can remember, people have seen this coming. The country faces this challenge in a more predictable way than evil Russians or climate hell. Incidentally, we have something here that the Greens are not to blame for.
As early as the turn of the millennium, I had a suspicion that instead of a pension notice, people like me would get a revolver plus cartridge. Since then, only the hope of profitably exporting postcolonialism studies has been added to the economic pension base. What else should I bet on? Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is considering no longer requiring its high school graduates to take math exams. In most other federal states, you could finally deselect them. Luckily there is no need for plumbers, engineers or scientists. A mass immigration of young, highly qualified workaholics is imminent. Something tells me that in 20 years I could still long for the current nursing shortage.
There are suggestions: retirement at 70. The economist Raffelhüschen thinks that patients should pay the first 800 euros for doctor visits themselves. Many clinics are threatened with closure. The voter expects that politics will not be outrageous, and politics answers: This is a rich country, the best Germany of all time. – Gerd had an operation and will soon be back home. Then everything is back to normal. The healthiest couple ever.
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#tempted #fate