The Christmas Letter

Our Year

Two-thousand-and-ten was tumultuous and life changing for Sibylle and me.

In December 2009, while vacationing in Turkey, Sibylle’s mother, Hannelore, became ill enough to require hospitalization. After a prolonged stay in the hospital there she was flown home to Germany with an attending doctor. Sibylle and I flew to Germany in late January to visit her mother, and spent a week in the hospital with her.

On February 6, 2010, just a week after our visit, Hannelore died from complications arising from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

We returned to Germany for the following two weeks to plan and hold a Trauerfeier (funeral service) for her mother, and to begin the process of attending to her affairs.

Sibylle returned to Germany for a week over spring break, and we both returned for two weeks in late May and early June. We took four days out of that trip to visit Füssen in the southern Germany region of Allgäu. In August Sibylle again returned to Germany for two weeks to finish closing her mother’s apartment. Her son Jonathan was able to spend a week there with her on that trip.

Over the summer we decided that as perfectly nice as our little rental house was, we wanted something of our own, something with a little more elbow room. After looking at online real estate sites we looked at a couple of houses and in one discovered the idea of a walk-out lower level for the piano studio. We were incredibly fortunate to find a realtor we could work with, who in turn knew about new houses being built on the west side of Manhattan that had walk-out lower levels.

Over the Labor Day weekend we negotiated back and forth (us to our realtor, to the builder’s realtor, to the builder, and back again) and committed to buying a house that had been started in late July. Over the course of the next several months we would make daily (sometimes twice or thrice daily) trips to our house, taking over 1500 pictures along the way.

On December 15th we closed on our house, and with the help of Dan Murphy from Mid-America Piano, and students in Sibylle’s studio, and colleagues from Mark’s job, we moved over the next 5 days into our house.

Sibylle’s studio continues to thrive, and Mark is now into his second year of violoncello. Taz and Bootstrap are exploring their new house with the aplomb that only cats possess. We are looking forward to settling into our new home, and to perhaps having a less tumultuous year in 2011.

We wish you and your families the very best in two-thousand-eleven and beyond.

Mark and Sibylle