Boynton woman reminds us: Songs bloom and grow forever
Frank Cerabino
There’s probably a song that works like medicine for you.
That’s what I’ve come to believe after talking to Andy Christie, a New York graphic artist whose mom used to live in Sterling Village, a sprawling condominium complex in Boynton Beach.
I first heard Christie talking about his mom on The Moth podcast, an online site that features people telling true stories about their lives.
Christie told the story of his mother’s death, and a wholly unexpected bit of musical magic near the very end.
“She wasn’t a big music lover,” Christie told me.
Which made what happened even more surprising. OK, first a little background.
Christie’s mom was a tough farm girl from Yugoslavia who became a refugee who fled the Nazis during World War II, and ended up in Austria, where she married a Scottish officer who was stationed there. They had two sons, and then she and her husband emigrated to the United States, where the marriage quickly fell apart.
“Once the Nazis were out of the picture, they finally had time to get a good look at each other,” Christie said.
Christie’s mother, Josefa Christie Neu liked to be called “Sophie.” And when she got older, she moved to Boynton Beach, living on her own in a condo. She clung to her inde- pendence, the son said. She did her own laundry and vacuuming, and when residents of Sterling Village were asked to evacuate for an approaching hurricane, she refused to go, pushing her couch against the front door of her unit instead, her son said.
Andy Christie said he’d book three or four trips a year to spend time in Florida with his mom and “be a son” by doing chores such as fixing her toilet, rehanging her cabinet doors and telling her neighbor to turn down the volume on the TV.
His mother, he said, had a complicated medical history, and frequently his trips to Florida would coincide with one of her regular hospital stays, which he described as “tune ups.”
“She would spend a couple of days in the hospital, having her essential systems tuned up,” he said, “then she’d come home as good as new — or as good as a used, but well-maintained machine.”
But four years ago, when his mom was 88, the medical