What About The Lusser Children??

Tante Traute and Tante Heide, c. 2016

I grew up surrounded by my mother's sisters. Our family, along with Tante Heide's and Tante Traute's, lived a bit "commune style" with all adults parenting all kids. My aunts were fun, funny, and strict. I wish I had appreciated them back then as much as I do now.

You'll hear more from both of them in Season 2 of The Man Who Calculated Death. As you can imagine, since Tante Heide was 88 and diagnosed with cancer in Season 1, it does not end well for her, but she remains my guide into my grandfather's life in America, at Redstone Aresenal in Huntsville, Alabama. When we visit together, we uncover some truths she didn't even know. Tante Traute will be with us also . At 93, she likes to call herself, "The Last of the Mohicans," which I am not sure is politically correct, but she is the last surviving child of Robert Lusser from his first marraige, to my grandmother Hilde.

One of my listeners asked about Dorle and Uli. Ulrich was my mother's younger brother, the only boy among Robert and Hilde's five kids. Their stories make me sad, as it was the eldest child and the youngest who seemed to bear the burnt of their traumatic, turbulent beginning. Both suffered severe PTSD. When my Tante Dorle's life tanked when her son died at age 38 from alcoholism, her marraige imploded and her OCD got so bad as to incapacitate her. Diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, she died in 2009. What I remember most was Tante Dorle's long, gorgeous legs, jet black hair, and the coke bottle glasses she wore due to early onset cataracts. They made her black eyes, so reminiscent of my grandmother's, huge and shiny.

As for Uli. My handsome uncle had thick hair always tinged blond from the sun and sky blue eyes. He was smart--the world could have been his--but he suffered from mental illness and slowly drifted away from the family. He wrote letters to my mom, accusing everyone of everything, and then, took off on his sailboat and disappeared. It is only this year that we got notice that he had died in the Phillipines, alone, found floating in his skiff a few hundred yards from the sailboat he lived on. I'm still not sure what killed him. Heart attack? Aneurism? Loneliness? What I know is that his psychic pain broke my mom's heart--and my aunts' too. Uli had been just 4 years old when he was buried in the rubble of the imploding farmhouse, his mother lying a few feet away with a broken neck. The story that Heide tells at the end of Episode 9 breaks my own heart every time. That final episode is now out so let me know what you think and please continue to help me spread the word about The Man Who Calculated Death. Be well, XO, Suzanne

The Lusser Children c. 1942, clockwise from far right: Uli, Traute, Gabi, Heide, Dorle--the only one who inherited the dark hair and dark eyes of her mother, who had Roma heritage.