Lübeck is the setting of a brief but consequential chapter in the narrator’s parents’ separation: the narrator’s father moves there to live with a new partner and her two small children, then leaves as his illness advances. After his death, a woman identified as his last girlfriend in Lübeck seeks a quiet connection to his family by visiting his grave, where flowers appear without the narrator’s mother knowing their source.

A New Household After the Separation

The move to Lübeck follows years of strain between the narrator’s parents. With no children living at home and no dog, their worries and fears become harder to bear together. The narrator’s father meets a woman who has two young children and moves in with her; the parents’ long-delayed separation becomes a reality. The narrator hears children in the background when calling his father in Lübeck, a small domestic detail that marks how fully his father has entered another household.

Illness and Return

When the narrator’s father becomes ill again, the new life in Lübeck proves difficult to sustain. He undergoes surgery on his leg and radiation treatment for shadows found on his lungs, and tries unsuccessfully to return to work. He avoids having the narrator meet his partner and her children, a separation the narrator says suited him. As his father increasingly feels like a burden within this newly formed family, he makes the bitter decision to leave Lübeck and return alone to the family home, situated amid the psychiatric hospital.

A Connection After Death

After the narrator’s father dies, his brother calls the last girlfriend in Lübeck while investigating a long-standing monthly payment for an undisclosed apartment in Kiel. She knows nothing about that apartment, but is glad to speak with someone from the family. She had learned of the death in the newspaper and had not dared attend the funeral. Asking whether she may visit the grave, she receives permission. Thereafter, flowers are regularly left there, though the narrator’s mother does not know who brings them.

Lübeck thus marks both the father’s attempted departure into a new domestic life and a surviving tie that becomes visible only after his death. The flowers preserve that tie without resolving it into a reunion: the woman remains outside the family’s knowledge, while her recurring visits quietly register a private act of remembrance.