reflections…

Thursday was the one year anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death. I can’t believe that much time has passed already. For the past week, I have found myself regularly thinking back to that time and reflecting on how it impacted my life.

A few months after our wedding in 2015, my husband and I started looking at buying our first house. His parents heard we were in the market and asked whether we could buy a bigger house, with help from them, and they could move in with us. They were finding managing their house to be challenging as they grew older, and in their culture (they both grew up in another country) parents move in with their adult children, not to senior homes.

My in-laws indicated they would stay in their house for a couple years after we bought the house, at which point they would move in. They had plenty of money saved up and wanted to move into an assisted living center once they could no longer care for themselves. They had their own lives and enjoyed going out to eat and traveling, and assured us they would cook and clean up after themselves and wouldn’t be home much. After a long discussion, my husband and I agreed. After all, they made it sound like it wouldn’t be much different than us living alone, other than a minor loss in privacy.

I’m sure you can see where this is going, but nothing turned out the way I expected. His parents moved in 6 weeks after we bought the house, not 2 years. They did do their own cooking, but never cleaned. They did put away our dishes on workday mornings and did watch our dog during the day, but they rarely left the house. There was a period where my husband and I were never home alone without them for 10 weeks. My mother-in-law complained about everything from the cleanliness of the house (even though it would be easier to help out than complain), how much time we spent with the dog (dude, I love that dog so much I would take him with me everywhere if I could), and that we didn’t take them out to dinner often enough (even though we were working hard to pay for a mortgage and my health bills). She said some less than friendly things to me when my husband wasn’t around, including suggesting he would be happier without me, but I won’t go into that. I was never truly comfortable in my own home.

So, honestly, when my mother-in-law was dying with cancer and we all had to give up our lives to take care of her, I was kind of angry. They were supposed to be in an assisted living center long before that ever happened. That’s selfish to say, but it’s how I felt.

But watching her die was more difficult than I expected. Her decline was swift, and a stark contrast to the painfully slow but significant decline of my own mother. She died two months after first being admitted to the ER, and only a couple weeks after we were finally given the cancer diagnosis.

All I remember during her final month is being exhausted and wishing she would die, mostly so she wouldn’t be miserable, but selfishly so the rest of us wouldn’t either. And I remember her cries of pain. Those stuck with me for a long time. Friends, you learn a lot about yourself looking at your own reflection in the mirror when applying makeup to the sounds of someone crying out, while you do nothing to help. I had to remove and reapply my makeup most mornings, because inevitably I would start crying and ruin it. I had known plenty of people who have died, I had just never been there to bear witness to their suffering, to watch the thread of life so quickly unravel. It does something to you, and maybe that’s good. It reminds us of our humanness, that we can’t help but feel compassion regardless of the relationship.

For a while after my mother-in-law’s death, I was angry. I would open a kitchen drawer to get a spoon and would be reminded how she rearranged my entire kitchen shortly after they moved in while I was at work one day. Or I would remember while packing up her clothes to give to Goodwill how she had so many clothes that she had to keep them in 4 separate bedrooms in my house, including storing some in our closet. All of that made me angry, even though it happened years earlier, and even though it mattered none now that she was dead. Death has a way of bringing everything back to light.

But as time passed, I let some of that anger go. I started seeing a counselor in January, more to deal with the heartbreak of watching my mom suffer without being able to help, but the counselor reminded me that grief isn’t linear. We expect to feel a single emotion when someone passes – sadness, and expect it to start out strong and lessen as time passes. Grief is so much more complex. It’s anger and sadness and guilt and heartbreak and anxiety and relief and every other emotion under the sun, and they all come in waves, not a straight line. And, according to my counselor, strained relationships are often the most difficult to grieve because so much is left unsaid, and we’re not comfortable with stories that are unresolved.

Although my relationship with my mother-in-law was strained, we had some good times, too. Over the past year I have come to acknowledge that a fair part of the strain was my own doing. I wish I would have seen that earlier, but perhaps that’s the kind of illumination only death and time can provide. As is true with most things in life.

My father-in-law still lives with us. We make dinner for him every night, help with his laundry, and clean up after him. If my husband and I go out to dinner, we bring him with. In fact, in the year since his mom died, my husband and I have not been out to dinner just the two of us. I miss the life we had before his parents moved in. I miss the early part of our marriage, where we were carefree and not constantly concerned with the needs of his parents. I miss not wearing a bra in my own house and watching Orange is the New Black without worrying if my father-in-law is going to walk in during a particularly graphic lesbian love scene (it happened once and we didn’t make eye contact for a week).

And sometimes, on still mornings, or when the three of us sit down to an ill-prepared dinner, I miss my mother-in-law. Life is profoundly more complex than I am prepared for.

“What is stronger than the human heart which shatters over and over and still lives.”
― Rupi Kaur

Smell ya later.
– Linds