In her 60s, Sonia eventually retired (after 40+ years of working for the Red Cross, helping separated families, but also various refugees... so you know, no big deal).
She moved out of Metz for the first time since the end of WW2, to live closer to her damn daughter, and to help her raise us.
She lived in front of the kindergarten my little sister attended, and close to my school. So after school, we'd go straight to her place for a couple of hours every day.
She'd give us snacks (...and would let me snack on her leftover pasta, which I suspect she'd eventually cook just for me knowing that I prefered savory stuff to sugary snacks), would play games with us, would talk.
She was very good at talking, I just wish I had been better at listening.
Sonia was my own personal hero as a kid and a teen. She was the only one who'd take me out of that f*cking house to show me the outside world. To show me that there even was a world outside in the first place.
She took me and/or my then-sister (sometimes both, but usually alternating) on vacations. Showed us the sea and the ocean.
I don't have a lot of good memories of my childhood (I don't have a lot of memories at all). But the good ones were always related to her.
Told us all these amazing stories about her f*cking incredible life, some of which I did, sadly, not commit to memory the way I should have.
Tried to speak some German with me which she had learned from her mother (my ex-sister never learned German).
Told us about Tunisia, and in general all the things that she had learned while working for other (oftentimes richer) people.
Read books. All the times, books. Books books books. She had tons of them.
Bought her first TV in her 60s and fell in love with #MurderSheWrote.
She also followed the Ramadan public service TV shows, that she said would air at night (I've never seen one, but she was adamant they existed on French TV in the 90s).
Was open-minded as f*ck when as a teen I considered maybe converting to Judaism (I eventually didn't, though).
Was the only person in the entire world who listened to my experiences of child abuse and never shut me up. Granted, she never got me out of there permanently (although she said she almost did, once), but just listening was gold to me.
While in high school, I was probably the only 15yo happily running to her grandmother's weekly to have our lunch.
After I moved out of my parents' at 18, she was the only person who cared to come to Paris once a month to have dinner with me, and care about how I was doing after my suicide attempt at 19.
Every month we'd go to a restaurant for a different country.
She never went "oh come on now, I survived WW2, a camp, a religious conversion, a gambling husband, crippling debt, no eating, single motherhood and the death of my true love". Not once.
If she ever thought it she at least never let me see it.
We urged her to write her memoirs, but she never got around to doing it. You can see how what little I remember of her life story would have been an amazing thing to tell the world.
Also my ex-mother, being her sole child, inherited all of her photos and papers. I don't have much left from her in that department. Lots of stuff is missing from her life story, that I'll never know about.
And then came March 8th, 2006. The stupidest sh*t.
She fell on the floor of her bathroom. Couldn't get up. Spent a few hours there until my then-sister found her.
Sonia was brought to the hospital and she spent, I believe, a bit over a week there. Half-conscious on her better days.
Things went downhill pretty fast.
Had all kinds of machines around... She stopped eating. She stopped everything.
I think the pride kicked in again, and she didn't want to live like that, to be treated like that, to be seen like that.
My then-mother said she had refused to see me. A few months prior, we'd had a fight, and my ex-mother said that Sonia was still mad.
I try to believe it was not just that. I try to believe she didn't want me to see her like that.
One afternoon my then-mother let me come to the hospital. I stood a few meters away, in the hospital's hallway, seeing Sonia from afar through a window. That was the last time.
Sonia turned her head, and almost saw me, but my mother told me to hide. So I hid and... I'll never know if it'd been ok to say hello anyway. To say sorry anyway. To say thank you anyway.
I wanted to stay. I was unemployed at the time, I could easily have stayed there, you know...? To be with her when ?
My ex-mother didn't let me. She instructed the nurse to call her when Sonia would go, or later the next morning if she'd leave during the night.
And that was it. She was left there. The woman was a force of nature and she died all alone.
