As you read this, it will be Mother’s Day or a few turns of the clock later.

All mothers are to be praised and celebrated. It is the Lord’s work with the return on investment mostly unknown and often endlessly in the future. As my wife commented during the period of intensive child-rearing, “The days are long but the years are short.”

Those currently mothering young kids during these recent years of contagion and lockdowns to go along with school violence and enhanced challenges of mental health have my particular admiration and awe.

While a thousand words of tribute to mothers and motherhood would be fitting, this column is not so much that as a testimony to the life of one mother. Mine.

Marion Sondermann left this earth almost exactly a month ago after a full, rich, engaged lifetime of over 95 years. It was a life of high points and low ebbs; of substantial accomplishment and heavy loss.

As with so many mothers, and especially those of that generation which has now largely passed from the scene, hers is a story that deserves to be told.

Let’s start at the beginning. My mother, then Hedwig Marion Obermeyer, was born in October 1927 in Nuremberg, just as the Nazi movement was beginning to stir across Germany.

For those who recall Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films of tens of thousands of goose-stepping Nazi troops, those parade grounds were mere blocks from my mother’s childhood home.

As the 1930s unfolded ever more precariously, my grandparents along with my mom and her older brother moved to Berlin. There, her father was imprisoned for refusing to turn the paper products factory he managed over to the Nazis. Eventually, the brownshirts simply confiscated it.

Rather than abstract history, Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, was lived experience for my mother. Hers was anything but a happy or carefree childhood.

Her immediate family managed to get out of Germany in March 1939, courtesy of a not-that-close relative who served as their U.S. sponsor. However, others, including my mother’s grandparents were left behind to their fate.

In 2005, we did a three-generation family roots trip, including a stop outside of Prague at Terezin, a concentration camp known as Theresienstadt during the Nazi era.

As the Nazis combined barbarity with meticulous record-keeping, we were able to confirm my mother’s long-held suspicion that her grandparents had perished there. Before leaving that afternoon, my mother, Tracy and I along with our two young kids recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.

A day or two after landing in New York City, mom acquired her first English words while playing outdoors. Over dinner that night with their sponsor family, she demonstrated her newfound fluency by telling them to “shut up.”

Soon the family was resettled to Indianapolis. There, the other half of the equation entered the picture. My father, Fred Sondermann, was also a German-Jewish refugee who had escaped with his parents literally days before the onset of WWII.

Fred became pals with my mother’s older brother. A few years later, upon coming home from wartime service in the U.S. Army, he found that the little sister had grown up. A courtship commenced.

My father lived large, dynamically and far too briefly. He was felled by cancer at age 54. During their time together, he was the bigger cheese and she the second fiddle. But she played that fiddle formidably.

Colorado College became their orbit and Colorado Springs their home. Community involvement and leadership were at their core. In the early 1970s, they would sometimes meet for breakfast on opposite sides of the table at joint meetings of the city council and school board. My father was an elected member of the former; my mother of the latter.

They were not perfect parents. As if perfection in that realm is attainable. What my mother lived through as a child had shut down a good deal of her emotional availability. Their many commitments meant that I, along with my brother and sister, knew something of the latchkey before that became a childhood adjective.

But they were a couple of immigrant kids who dodged the worst history has to offer and were leading lives they could only have imagined. In my father’s case, it was as if he knew that his would be a sprint, not a marathon.

His race ended in 1978 when a renal cancer that has been dormant for 23 years sprung back to life. Compounding the hard circumstances of my mother’s childhood, she became a widow four days shy of her 51st birthday.

If it slowed her down, it was only briefly and managed with utmost privacy. She never took on another partner and seemed not to even contemplate the notion. But she lived another 44 years without her other half and did so notably on her terms.

With master’s degree in hand, she created a career for herself as a political science instructor at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, winning accolades from students two generations younger. She opted to retire from that gig at age 80 in order to, in her words, “go out at the top of my game.”

Ultimately, a life is summed up in a handful of memorable, lasting characteristics. High on my mom’s list would be her kindness, her generosity, her steady, even keel, her insistence on thinking for herself and her utter lack of a judgmental bone.

In our 37 years together, my wife can recall maybe one critical comment on my mother’s part. I suspect most daughters-in-law would take such a track record.

All of that was accompanied by mom’s profound pride in her adopted country, notwithstanding its warts and shortcomings. A private note in the last couple of weeks from a Republican El Paso County legislator summed it nicely. “The United States gave Marion and Fred a home and they gave back even more.”

Old age is clearly not for sissies, and the last couple of years were rough for my mother. Now she is at rest. On this occasion of recognizing maternal blessings, hers fill the void.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for Colorado Politics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann