Personal essays
Lessons from my mother-in-law
A/C
Saturday I got a text from Maggie. She had just gotten off the phone with Mama - my mother-in-law - and Mama wants me to know that I should turn on my air conditioner.
It’s hot here in Cleveland right now. Really hot and really humid.
But I’m cheap so I don’t tend to turn on the window unit air conditioner in my bed room without prodding.
Geri, my mother-in-law, knows that I won’t listen to her if she suggests it so she sends the message through Maggie.
I smiled. It was very nice of her.
I packed up my stuff and went to a coffee shop and did work using their air conditioning and then came home and was really hot.
The call
Sunday I met an old radio friend for lunch. She and her husband have moved to Georgia. I imagine it’s really hot in Georgia. Really hot and really humid.
She was in town visiting her son and we met at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula.
Kim and Maggie used to go to a different Winking Lizard when I was out of town. I realized I’d never been to one.
We ordered our meals and were chatting when my phone rang.
I never answer the phone when I’m out with people but I glanced down and saw it was Mary Kay. Mary Kay, Kim’s aunt, never calls me. I answered it.
Geri, my mother-in-law, was dead.
Tom, my father-in-law, had found her in the bathroom. She’d gone there to put on makeup.
I know from experience that people will ask what she died of. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She was there having coffee with her husband of 65+ years one minute and dead on the bathroom floor the next.
I know from experience that sudden death is so difficult. Tom didn’t have time to watch her wither and diminish. He didn’t have time to prepare for her death. He sat with her one minute chatting about this and that and found her dead on the floor a minute later.
Memories
I first met Geri and Tom (if you say it the other way around you’ll think of the cartoon cat and mouse) thirty three years ago.
The summer before Kim and I got married, when her apartment lease was up, Kim decided to go back to her parents house and live at home with them one last time.
She also got a dog that would be ours. For that summer it lived at my in-laws house.
Kim signed us up for dog training class. I don’t know that it was her intent, but because Kim’s schedule was less flexible than mine, I had to go to my in-laws twice a day to train the dog. Kim wasn’t there and sometimes Tom was and sometimes he wasn’t. Geri was always there.
She’d come out to the backyard while I trained Tara. She’d roll her eyes - she thought it was ridiculous that I would come over twice a day to train the dog. She rolled her eyes a lot during the three decades I knew her.
Years later when Maggie was a baby I was over at their house again sitting in the back yard. The dog walked out of the house through the screen door and ripped the screen door.
Without blinking, my mother-in-law said, “oh that baby.” My father-in-law assumed that Maggie had ripped the screen door so he quietly fixed it. He wouldn’t have been so happy about the dog doing it.
For some reason, that memory captures my mother-in-law for me. Quick, kind, not always truthful, and always trying to get the best out of people.
I worry about my father-in-law.
He’s very capable and does a ton of work around the house.
I know from experience that it’s a huge adjustment but it’s doable.
But it’s the little things.
For 65+ years food has magically appeared on the table. Next to it is a small cup with the pills he needs to take. Someone has colored his reality to believe an infant has walked through a screen door and not a puppy.
I look in his eyes and see that the loss isn’t real yet. Soon it will be and for the rest of his life.
I drive home from their house and turn on my air conditioner.
Tonight I’ll giver her the last word.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 274. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe