Obituary assembled with little editing from candid interviews with various people who knew and had experiences with AMK over many years and places.
Anne Marie K. was born in Prague in 1916 to Hans Ebinger and Daniela Marky. The family lived with Mia’s maternal grandmother, the imperious Teresa. Teresa, who had worked for Mia’s grandfather as housekeeper, married the old widower when his own wife died. (People are always fucking the help, for crissakes!). Mia’s father, a Hungarian, worked at the Skoda Works, a manufacturer of automobiles, locomotives, and military hardware. Three years later, Mia’s sister Liselotte (Lilo)* was born. Mia and Lilo each had a nanny. Some time after that, Hans and Daniela were posted back to their native city, Budapest, by the company, oddly leaving their daughters behind in the care of Teresa and the nannies. Mia’s life of exile started early, remember this is central Europe.
(* See Lilo’s own obituary in this collection)
Before long, Lilo’s nanny had a big fight with Teresa. Little is known about the nature of this argument, but the nanny packed Lilo up and fled with her to Budapest and her parents. Mia was left in Prague where she was groomed to become Teresa’s companion. After her husband’s death, Teresa relocated to Munich, Germany, where she was originally from, taking Mia with her. Finally, when Mia was twelve, she returned to be reunited with her family in Budapest upon Teresa’s death. It is not known what became of either nanny.
Mia came back, having grown up absent from her family, only to find that her demanding and narcissistic younger sister, Liselotte, had come to occupy the center of all attention, not only at home but also in the social whirl of Budapest society. Mia became an exile in her own home. Later, both Annemarie and Liselotte studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, earning certificates in French culture and language (this is the phoniest of degrees; it’s doubtful that they attended classes). Alas, the idyllic cosmopolitan world of pre-war Budapest ended with the arrival of Adolf Eichmann in 1944, when the war finally came to Hungary. The city was subsequently levelled by Allied bombing. Mia and her husband Francis (Feri), a distinguished but taciturn neurologist, had to flee the country; poor Mia was uprooted again. Francis found work with the US Army in Germany, presumably as a doctor. On this basis, they were able to enter the US and become citizens. They lived first in North Carolina, where Mia earned a bachelor’s degree from Duke. They then moved to southern Ohio, where Francis worked as a neurologist for the state and was a member of the Rotary Club and the B.P.O.E. However, English was a very difficult language for him, and most Hungarians have an awful time of it. Ever helpful, Mia was able to translate for him most of the time. He always insisted that his nieces and nephew speak Hungarian with him; this resulted in many one-sided conversations, as they spoke little of that language.
Meanwhile, Mia’s sister Lilo and her family went to Brazil as refugees after the war. Mia’s parents also ended up in Brazil, not having any other place to go. For some reason, they could not go to the US, unable to find sponsorship. It appears Mia and Feri did not want them.
Annemarie and Francis settled in Waverly, on the shores of Lake White in southern Ohio, where they both enjoyed water skiing, bird watching and shooting chipmunks with a pellet gun. Mia assisted Francis in his business, doing the hard work of managing his medical office, where he evaluated mentally ill patients for the state, and was himself known as an odd bird. He would get a big kick out of driving the water-skiing boat too slowly for the skier to stay up, much less stand up out of the water. He was such a character. For several years in the sixties and seventies, Mia enjoyed dogs, raising a breed of Hungarian sheepdogs that were so aggressively violent they had to be kept caged at all times, away from all human contact. The sound of their barking was deafening, echoing across the surface of the lake. Mia and Feri also invented a form of the touchless car wash. This idea consisted of squeezing out the soapy water from a large sponge, and letting it slide down the side of the car, without touching the car with the sponge. Visitors and guests at Mia’s house were lodged in the basement, alongside the open crawl space and beside the furnace and the spider colonies. Oddly, none of this was thought eccentric.
Mia had one nasty characteristic: she was a devoted anti-semite. When her nephew, who had a Jewish fiancée, came to visit once, Mia lectured him on the subject of the Jews and that he should never marry one because they couldn’t be trusted, among other things. Understandably, he did not come back for a return visit. Later, she expressed her disappointment at him because he didn’t inform her of the birth of his three half-Jewish children.
Both Mia and Francis travelled the world on their holidays, combining their trips with tax-deductible medical conferences, as Mia was also an astute money manager. She had a predilection for dividend-paying stocks in their investments. To this day, she continues to harvest a bounty in quarterly dividends, from investments such as General Dynamics (war) and Walt Disney (peace). Mia and Feri also collected building lots around Lake White, presumably as investments, but also havens for bird-watching and chipmunk shoots.
After Francis died in 1987, Mia blossomed into an eco-tourist, visiting polar bears in their natural frozen habitat and whooping cranes during the sweltering mating season. She also lived in a yurt in Mongolia, and climbed Mount Sinai in search of religious ecstasy. Finding none, she became fiercely independent once her husband passed away, and more so when her domineering, narcissistic sister died. Who could blame her? Her early life was lived as a refugee and emigré. Now Mia travelled the world with a vengeance, alone, free of her onerous family at last. The great mystery is why she remained in Waverly after the death of Feri; possibly because Waverly was the only place on the planet where her sister Lilo would not move in on her and her assets.
Understandably, Mia could never trust anyone. Her generosity, however, was legendary: she never failed to allow others to pick up the check. And she had a hilarious sense of humor with respect to gift-giving: whatever old tchochke she didn’t want anymore, she would give away, insisting on what a fantastic object it was, and how grateful the receiver of such largesse should be. Nobody else trusted her either.
Mia was devoted to all things avian, and proved it by leaving her entire estate to a bird sanctuary in Virginia. Her only surviving relatives, her nieces and nephew, the children of her sister Liselotte, were left out of Mia’s will, as one would expect, since they were extensions of her sister as well as reminders of her own infertility, which she blamed on misguided X-ray treatments by European quacks. More likely, it was due to her husband’s lack of interest, engrossed as he was in his turgid work. She also expressed the view that, since no one ever did anything for her, she wasn’t going to do anything for anybody else either.
Feigning independence to the last, Mia insisted on taking care of herself, and going completely out of control. Much of her Lake White house burned in a fire caused by a decrepit space heater. Unfortunately, she had allowed her homeowner’s insurance to lapse. Her car did not fare much better, nearly all of it damaged by Mia’s erratic driving. Amazingly, the state of Ohio had renewed her driver’s license when she was ninety-two. It is not known if the car’s insurance had also lapsed. And once, while going to Columbus airport to pick up her niece visiting from Brazil, she drove for several hours toward Cincinnati before being found by police and her niece. She was always such a card. Luckily, her neighbors got her into a cottage in a nursing home compound, but she refused to pay the rent, on the grounds that she did not want to be there. She was also incensed that her neighbors should even think that she needed housing.
When finally forced out of her cottage and into the main facility, she kicked and cursed, again asserting her independence. She faced imminent lockdown had she not changed her mind. In the event, her lawyer saved the day by taking her home with him. That got him into all sorts of trouble.
Update needed here……………………….
Her burned-out house sold recently, and a long chapter of her history closed with this transaction. She was on this property for fifty or so years, most of them alone, the rest with a husband she loathed; she kept herself buried in Waverly, away from the rest of her family, knowing they would never come and stay too long.
Mia died peacefully at the home of her companion somewhere in North Carolina, back where she first lived when coming to the US, on the night of Saturday, April1, 2017, far from her birthplace in the Hapsburg Empire. Unexpectedly and quite improbably, in this last stage of her life, Mia had found a friend who took her in, and away from the hated nursing home. We should all have such blessings. She was a hundred and one.
Please direct all letters of condolence, and contributions to Mia’s favorite charity, to Douglas Sladoje, Esq., of Chillicothe, Ohio, her other one-time attorney who master-minded the creation of her cruel will. The great irony is that by the time she died her estate’s investments had grown to $ 2 million, and not a penny went to her blood kin.
