96th birthday of a lady with a double identity

Today would have been the 96th birthday of my mother-in-law, Jeannette. Well, I casually say Jeannette, but her naming was just a tad more complicated than that. You don’t know the story? It’s a good one.

Jeannette, as we always called her
The flower was given to Danielle by our son David
It came from where we scattered her ashes
- in a Strasbourg river

I’m not sure exactly what happened between Jeannette’s parents at the time of her birth. It sounds like they couldn’t agree on a name. Her father favoured ‘Elise’, her mother ‘Jeannette’. But it was the father who had the advantage, since he was the one registering her birth. Down she went as Elise in the official archives.

But Jeannette’s mother was a forceful lady. Her daughter’s birth certificate was in the wrong name? No problem. She merely scratched out the forename and substituted the one she (the mother) wanted. Her name was Jeannette, and it was clearly marked on her birth certificate.

France tends to be quite strict on documents. But Jeannette was from Alsace, in the far east of France, a region that swapped hands between France and Germany three times in 75 years. Regulations aren’t always as religiously followed there, especially in small country villages.

Other documents were based on her birth certificate. The ‘livret de famille’ or family booklet. Her national identity card. Her passport when she came to get one. It all went smoothly, to the point that she never even became aware that she had a different name.

It was my fault that her relative calm was shattered. In the early years of the century, Danielle and I were living in France. Already then it struck me that Britain was dangerously likely to give way to its uglier demons and leave the EU. Since I didn’t want to jeopardise my right to live in a European country more committed to civilised values, I decided to take advantage of being in France and married to a Frenchwoman, to take out French nationality.

For that, Danielle needed to prove her own right to citizenship. And that meant proving that her mother had been entitled to it. She submitted all the necessary paperwork and we waited for the response.

“Sorry,” they told us, “we have no record of a French citizen born on 24 January 1925 and called Jeannette Brugner.”

Danielle sent in all sorts of documents, official ones, in that name, that did rather suggest Jeannette existed. But they were having none of it. Until it emerged that there had, indeed, been a girl born on that date, in Strasbourg, and with the right surname, but a different forename.

“Could your mother be Elise?” they asked Danielle. 

Jeannette discovered that she was. The French authorities made an effort, sorted out the paperwork and a couple of years later, I was granted French nationality. As a result, I can now live in Spain in some security, despite Brexit, since a Frexit is still highly unlikely (not that there isn’t a small minority of French citizens calling for it).

When I first met Jeannette – there’s no point calling her Elise – she was still not 60, and seemed far younger. Her dynamicsm and excellent spirits were no doubt fostered by her job, as an assistant in the YWCA in the nearby city, Basel in Switzerland. There she was looking after young women, most of them apprentices, many in the pharmaceutical industry so present in that city. Full of life and fun, they communicated those qualities to Jeannette.

But then there was an accident. She was knocked off her bike by a car, on her way home. That need not be too disastrous – it’s happened to me too. But in her case, she was thrown into a deep excavation made by roadworkers, with steel beams sticking vertically from the bottom. Both her hips were shattered.

Sadly, she never made a full recovery. Instead, she grew increasingly disabled, and in pain, both from the injuries and from the rheumatoid arthritis which increasingly affected as she grew older. By the end of her life, it was becoming unbearable for her to keep surviving, but it was hard to help her with that problem in France. There, at least at that time, physicians simply could not consider the possibility of ending treatment on a patient. Again and again, Jeannette would fall ill, be hospitalised, and then find herself subjected to surgery which did nothing to ease her suffering and, indeed, inflicted more pain on her.

Danielle had to argue with the physicians to stop intervening with her mother.

“But she’ll die,” they told her.

“Yes,” Danielle replied, “it’s time to let her go. That’s what she wants. And you shouldn’t block her.”

She was with Jeannette for her last few nights. And on the last one, with Jeannette’s breathing becoming increasingly strained, Danielle couldn’t prevent the tears rising to her eyes. Jeannette woke and saw her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s OK.”

And squeezed her hand.

Soon afterwards, she slipped away, in calm at last.

Today would have been her 96th birthday. But what cruelty it would have been to have imposed the extra dozen years on her. Better that it be us, the survivors, who celebrate her life and raise a glass to her memory.