By Katja Bartholmess (July 21, 2025)
Those who are near to me know that I never shy away from a word of affection. You will be my babe, dear, darling, or buttercup before you know it.
I don’t relate to the impulse to compulsively shorten names as a sign of familiarity so common in the English speaking world. Given the choice, I’d much rather pronounce all your syllables.
My impulse is to add syllables rather than subtract them. Let me let your name stew in my mouth a bit longer. (Am I making this weird?)
In fact, my favorite linguistic practice is to tag the names of my unsuspecting friends with a -lein or -chen. These German word endings denote smallness, cuteness, dearness. Your name is Danny? Great, you’re now either Danny-lein or Danny-chen.
My mother was used to receiving the triple crown treatment from me. Publicly I referred to her as “Mutti” – itself a term of endearment derived from “Mutter” that’s most commonly used among East Germans. But when I addressed her in private or in writing, I added not just one of the cute endings but both. She became my Mutti-lein-chen. (And this is the correct stack. If you wonder if it could also be Mutti-chen-lein, it absolutely could not. There must be rules even to the most excessive adoration!)
I like to believe that I’m the only person who called her mother that.
I loved calling her that.
She loved being called that.
Let’s keep that in mind for now while I switch gears to say that I used to be an extremely prolific writer of letters. And the most frequent recipient of these letters was my mother. She loved everything I wrote. Of course she did, she was maternally obliged to. But I also know that she, a mathematically minded engineer, genuinely enjoyed the occasionally rather wild mind of her daughter. When I turned eight years old, my mother gifted me a mechanical typewriter she had procured for my birthday on the East German black market, willfully adding a clacketty-clack racket to our otherwise rather quiet household of two.
I wrote her whole epistolary novels worth of letters – first actual pen-on-paper affairs that required a licked stamp, and then of course emails. Countless letters traveled to her from my long stints in London, Pretoria, Tokyo, my travels in India and Nepal, my first time in NYC. I wanted to show her the world that had been closed off to her for most of her life at that point. But in writing to her, I was also able to situate myself in these places and could track how they went from new and mysterious to familiar over time. I used a traditional letter format for most of my writing to her all through my geographically hyperactive 20s and well into my 30s until instant short-form exchanges (first on Skype and then Whatsapp) replaced my long form written communications.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an archive of that, you wonder? So much of who I ultimately became was forged in those places where I had to figure out and assert who I was over and over again. And a lot of that growth went into those letters to my mother. In my idealized view, I’m sure the sum of these letters would amount to a written representation of “me” – every letter a layer like musculature, tissue, and skin that eventually form a living being when layered on a skeleton.
It would be amazing, actually.
It was within reach too.
But the aforementioned terms of endearment got in the way.
When I went through my mother’s effects after she died, I discovered that she had indeed painstakingly kept an archive of everything I ever wrote to her. The letters organized, the emails printed. Boxes of them. Mountains.
Time becomes a bit unstuck when you lose your only parent, so I don’t know exactly how soon I found these mountains. It was some time after I first dared to enter my mother’s apartment, which was also the apartment I grew up in. I have never felt less capable of crossing a threshold in my life, but I needed to find her birth certificate, her divorce papers, my birth certificate – all bearing East German insignia – so that her death certificate could be officiated and her funeral arranged.
I would like to say that my heart jumped with joy when I found the first box and realized what it contained. But my heart was capable of no such escapades, leaden as it was with the weight of all-consuming grief.
I picked out the first letter. The date was from some time when I lived in London. I was such a baby then. But my eyes never made it to the contents, they just kept skipping back to how I addressed her:
“Mutti-lein-chen.”
The word most lovingly reserved for her – and only her – was suddenly the most gutting reminder that this term of endearment would never again have a destination. Would never again be met with a smile and a sparkle of the eye and a warm press of the hand.
I picked out the next letter.
And there was the word again.
“Mutti-lein-chen.”
It was mocking me. Blinding me.
I wish I hadn’t used that goofy word. I wish I had addressed her in a way that didn’t trigger the pain of having your skeleton removed through your belly button.
But I did use that goofy word. Over and over and over.
And so I placed my palms on the stacks in the boxes. Breathed in. Breathed out. And then I tipped every last letter into blue recycling bags and had them fed to the paper pulp mill.
Gone.
I want to be mad at myself about it. Why didn‘t I delay the decision? Couldn‘t I have left the boxes with someone until the grief was less acute and I could make a more clear-eyed decision?
But I can’t be mad at myself. How was I to imagine a time when the grief was “less acute” when I don’t know how I even made it through that month? The one that I spent in Germany after my mother died in my arms.
Now it‘s three summers later and I could absolutely face those boxes now. And while it still stings to have thrown away these letters, I think it‘s also a good sign that I‘m able to be upset about a pile of inked paper. It must mean that even the worst grief can become a much gentler companion with time. It must mean something good.
The End