By: Fritz Von Ludwigslust
Summer 2000 just across the mighty Hudson ......
"Everything in my family is a dead end"! "This is just too much to take in this (can not print here) family of mine"! I just sat dumbfounded and stunned as my friend Ludroig spat out these words in disgust and disappointment. "What happened, what do you mean"? was all that I could reply. Ludroig just shook his head and then sunk into his seat at the coffee shop that we had been sitting in by the river. I already knew a lot about his family history which was very similar to mine and ours had been lives trying to keep our heads above the water, or should I say above the liquor or alcohol. The scale in families of addictions like ours were only comparable to a graph in which the line only goes down, or stays static for short periods.... before nose diving again. Like typical children of families wracked with addiction we unknowingly accepted all of these unjust, unfair and unacceptable situations and circumstances as the norm that most people would find unbelievable and inconceivable. This is a sad and tragic pattern of thought in those who grew up in the degradation of addiction. Ludroig was tall with floppy copper colored hair that was swept to the side of his angular, Germanic face. He was a very talented landscape designer who also loved to go to the revival theaters to watch classic films with us. He was always in an easy going, agreeable mood which helped him in his "family" situation.
I knew that Ludroig had just come off of two tragic deaths in his family within two days time, and he was facing the responsibility of paying for his Mothers final costs on his own.
It was all too familiar with me also coming from a family with extreme cases of denial, abandonment and addiction.
We sat in silence for a few long minutes. This explosion came after Ludroig had just gotten off his phone with a distant cousin in West Virginia, that he had actually never met. He had believed that she may know of some family information that he needed to find a final resting place for his Mothers urn. His Mother had left no insurance money or means for a proper funeral or burial. I now understand how incredibly hard it must have been for him to grieve over his Mother, a woman who he had very mixed emotions about. The cousin informed him that she had no idea where his Grandfather and the rest of the Von Losch family were buried. Ludroig knew that this was not true as this cousin had been the executor of many of their wills of that family as they had passed away over the years. Ludroig had never actually met any of them except one Great-Aunt and the one cousin. Ludroig told me repeatedly that he knew that his cousin was not telling the truth and that she was always very vague and confusing on the phone with every conversation that they had had. In other words, she was lying and hiding something that she did not want him to know, but Ludroig was onto her from day one.
I tried to lighten up the conversation after just having seen "Sylvie et la Fantome" in a revival theater nearby, but it didn't work. It was like going from a fantasy film to a film of harsh realities. The conversation went back to the denial, lies and secrets in dysfunctional families of addiction. I agreed that it was very true, that there were many dead ends in this type of family due to the lack of responsible behavior by those acting out addicts within each family system. There was no taking care of things properly or even just the normal, simple procedure of keeping records, papers, documents and personal things in order. I should know, this was typical of my immediate family as well. If the family records had been kept Ludroig would have had no problem finding his Grandfathers grave or mausoleum where he wanted to put his Mothers urn. His Grandfathers urn had supposedly been kept in the home on 111 Lac street where the family built a home in 1880 when they came from Germany and Hungary. The house had been in a shambles for many years and most of the family would not visit it because it was in the same state as the house in the cult film "Grey Gardens". His cousin had been living a hermit's life of a different type of addiction. Ludroig was one of the very few that did visit his cousin despite the hoarding mess and mentioned to me that it was very odd that his cousin claimed that she could not find his Grandfathers urn amongst the huge mazes and passage ways of junk in the house. Ludroig told me that his own Mother had told him that Berta his cousin also had the urns of several other family members there. It seemed eccentric and cheap as the cousin was quite wealthy and could have interned the urns anywhere at any given time. That is not what Berta had done at all despite the fact that she had collected substantial life insurance policies on all the members of the two family house, inherited the house after her own mother died and even inherited a huge amount of stocks and bonds from her Uncle who had died of cirrhosis of the liver as a young bachelor. Berta was never made to work and so she just hoarded massive amounts of junk and traveled the world in between, while the urns of all the family members that she profited from sat forgotten in the attic. That is until she devised another plan as how to "bury" them on her own, cash free and in secrecy.
Time went by, Ludroig got on with his life and assumed that the urns had all since gone into a family mausoleum since they were staunch church members at a Lutheran congregation close by. The subject never came up again until present day of this story in 1999 after the tragic deaths of his Mother and cousin just days apart.
Ludroig kept his Mothers urn by his fireplace mantel and started his intense search to find her Fathers resting place. She had been her Fathers favorite and so it seemed very fitting to have them together. His Grandfather had died young at 39 years old when his Mother was only 14. He had been long forgotten by the family, I believe due to the fact that his urn disappeared and so did his memory with it. Denial, secrets and "I didn't know", all typical in a family of addiction.
It was two months later that Ludroig got desperate and very aggressive to find out the truth about the lie that his relative down south seemed to be hiding. Ludroig worked in a law firm with many powerful legal connections and I told him to finally use them to end this mystery. He had a lawyer contact his cousin in West Virginia to claim that there was a major investigation in this families case, about the where-abouts of many of its members resting places and final details. The cousin broke in all of two minutes and asked the lawyer to have Ludroig contact her again.... but she would say nothing to the lawyer over the phone.
Day of Reckoning Autumn of 2000
I was home anticipating the outcome of Ludroig's long awaited D-Day conversation with West Virginia. The news was shocking and almost comical in a very, very dark way. Ludroig came over to make the same exclamation as he did in the coffee shop many months before. "Everything in my family is a dead end"! "I just can not believe this s**t"! Ludroig paced back and forth nervously and proceeded to imitate his cousins confession word for word in a slightly hillbilly drawl.
"Well I don't know how to tell you this, so I'm just gonna say it straight Ludroig", "they're all in the backyard", pause ...... several moments of dead silence ..... "yea you heard right, they're all in the back of the house in the rose garden by the fence". She then went on to tell him that over the years Berta had slowly emptied all of the ash urns into the soil around the old fashioned roses that grew up the fence in the backyard. His cousin said that she herself could not believe it either and that Berta had only confessed this to her the previous summer and was shocked to discover that there were at least eleven loved ones deposited in the garden. Surprisingly and suspiciously Berta herself requested that her own ashes be spread on the Long Island sound and not in the rose garden with her own Mother, father and Grandparents as well as her Uncle, Ludroigs Grandfather. It was the bitter Icing on the sour cake of his family and he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I'll never forget that eerie night that I accompanied Ludroig to 111 Lac street after that devastating conversation with his cousin in West Virginia. We were both quiet and I was very nervous on the path train that very late night that he decided to investigate his family's property, before the new owners took over the home. The walk from the Path station to Lac street seemed to take forever although in reality it was no more than seven or eight blocks away. The streets were empty as we approached the old, silent house and it was very dark as there were no street lamps close to the vacant house. We had to climb over a high steel fence equipped with pocket flashlights, because the box-like structure was situated with only a tiny front yard and no access to the back from the street, except for extremely narrow paths on the sides of the building to the backyard. The home had those old fashioned gritty roof like tiles as siding and it hurt to brush against them as we struggled to get to the infamous backyard. I had never been there before so I had no idea where I was or which way to go. We finally squeezed our way to the back area and could relax for a minute although I was extremely nervous about being there at 2 o clock in the morning, looking like suspicious shadows sneaking around. The night air was still and I felt an unnerving silence, as we waited for our eyes to adjust to the pitch black darkness behind the light less empty home. There were enormous Norway Maples that draped over the rear of the house and yard blocking the night sky, but we could still make out the back fence and the roses there as they were in the open just out of reach of the shade trees monstrous branches. I could see the large white roses glowing in the night like balls of snow and they smelled of cloves. The ground beneath seemed like very damp, heavy soil with only small patches of weeds here and there. I tried not to think about me possibly standing or walking on all of those souls who were literally dumped in this rose garden. I still don't know what Ludroig expected to find there that night. I mused that maybe it was just his way of saying goodbye to the Grandfather and older family members that he had never met. It was so tragic and sad as we stood there in silence for over an hour.
We did not say a word as we squeezed back through the side of the house and over the fence to freedom or on the walk back to the station and I was relieved to be back on the path to Manhattan. Ludroig thanked me profusely on the return ride to the city, but I did not really hear anything he said on that ride as I was numb, shell shocked and shook up by all of this. I did not sleep well that night, or for several weeks after that.
Next summer, 111 Lac street ......
Unknowing to the new buyers and owners of the house and property the site was sold quickly, despite the unusual garden in the backyard. The house was torn down and a new but not very attractive brick building went up immediately. Ludroig often walks by the former home of his family acknowledging and trying to show some kind of respect to the eleven spirits in the rose garden.
In reality it is a family cemetery in someone else's backyard.
Copyright @ 2015 by Fritz Von Ludwigslust. All Rights Reserved.
