I don't know if I'm going to have my mother in law for much longer. It seems like maybe a matter of days now. she's fading so fast. I hate to clog this up, but i don't know where else to go to let these things out of me. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff down and if it's okay I'm just going to put it here to get it out of me.
I Am A ChildI was 15 when my grandmother passed away. Growing up, we had been very close. Many weekends I had spent at her house where she taught me how to sew, how to bake, how to do crosswords. We played scrabble together, watched the matinee movie on tv together for Saturday lunch. If I stayed long enough she would take me to church with her on Sundays. She always assumed I would be bored, and tried to get me to go to Sunday school instead…but her grandiose church with the incense and the stained glass windows was what I loved. I didn’t care if what they said was kind of long and boring, I loved sitting in the church with my Nan. It was and still is one of my favorite places. My personal place of holiness.
She had been on dialysis for kidney failure for a number of years, but she got very sick when I reached my teens, and was eventually hospitalized, and that was where she died.
I don't remember a lot of her illness. Nan changed a lot when she got sick. She stopped wanting to read, or do crosswords, and didn't seem very interested in talking much...and one of the last times I visited her, she didn't know who I was at all, and was talking to me about people she went to school with. It scared me enough that no-one really expected me to see it worsen.
I think it was a function of my age that I didn’t really think about her dying. And if I did, I didn’t have much of a logical connection to what that really meant, how that would feel. But it hit me hard, like a punch in the stomach, when they lowered the coffin and it made its way out of the chapel to the crematorium. I had a visual cue that told me I wasn't going to see her again. The realization hurt so much, and scared me, as abrupt and painful is someone had just torn off my arm.
The terror I felt at my grandma suddenly not existing anymore stayed with me for a long time, manifesting into a lifelong fear of death and dying that had started when I was very young and became a fear that could wake me from my sleep with a full-blown panic attack. But that was a thing I tried to keep inside. I didn’t know how to make it stop, or go away, so I just tried not to think about it.
Flashforward to 37 year old me.
In an unlikely but wonderful turn of events, over the past 10 years my mother in law has slowly been filling in the hole that was left after my grandmother’s death.
For one thing, she was roughly the same age as Nan. Her personality was completely different to Nan’s – Nan was a very proper lady, not prim or even stern, but just … very even. Practical and no-nonsense. Mauraid was effusive, full of hugs and bursting to overflowing with love and praise for her own immediate family, as well as me, the interloper. I wasn’t a stranger with Mauraid, I was her daughter. But her age afforded me the same gift of wisdom and experience that my Grandmother had. I have a voracious appetite for knowledge and unfettered curiosity - Finally, a new person who had been places, seen thing, who could fill my bucket with new stories of a different life, a different childhood, new other worldly experiences.
We played scrabble together. We talked about the books that we read. We watched movies together. And we shared a lot of time together. She drew me into her family and loved me like a daughter, and I relished the warmth of having that kind of love so far away from my family.
The greatest gift we shared was when we began to go to church together at Christmas. Neither of us regular church goers, but this time together was us going to say hello to the people far from us – I could commune with the memory of my grandmother, and Mauraid could commune with her brother who had passed a few years before, and her mother who had died when Mauraid was a young girl of 21. That was the time when we were closest, and I felt like I had gained a new power, a power to harness my past and steer it in a new direction.
Time is a wheel. And our wheel of fortune took a turn for the worse. A year ago, my mother-inlaw was diagnosed with Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was 3 months. At first it was a blow, for her, for our family, everyone. I feared the worst and struggled not to grieve her daily. Yet, even through the wheel had spun us down to the depths, it slowly was spinning her, and us up out of the bad. Undertaking a strange and rather radical homeopathic therapy, my mother in law surprised her doctors, and us, and lived for another year after her diagnosis with no growth in her tumors.
The year lulled me back into the routine of our life, and I got used to the idea that we might have her around for a while, despite the initial scare.
Oh, cruel fortune.
We all tell ourselves stories so that we don't have to face the inevitable truth. But the truth had arrived. Mauraid’s tumors were now growing, her pancreas was obstructed, and the wheel had again begun turning downwards once more. Much as I wanted to hide from it, the truth was here and bearing down.
Terminal stages of an illness causes a remarkable shedding of niceties. Not only in family, but in the patient. At least, that’s what I have seen in my family. Mauraid most noticeably. Where once she had not wanted to talk about what would happen if it got worse, where the knowledge of the growth inside of her had kept her awake at night and scared her to tears, she was now steely and resolute in her acceptance of what she now saw as the inevitable end.
My denial of the truth was now seeming almost quaint, childlike…and kind of sad. The more my world was challenged, the more flimsy it felt…and the more lost I felt. I couldn’t hang onto this idea that Mauraid was going to live forever. Yet in spite of what I could see happening right in front of me, I was still clutching tightly to my fear of death with both hands.
I've watched her get more and more frail...more and more tired...She can no longer digest any food. Her eyesight is worsening. I can hear her teeth when she talks. Physically, it seems like she just melts a little more every day. Conversation grows increasingly difficult. She trails off in mid sentence, her mind like tufts of dandelion seeds on a windy day.
Where at 16 I was on the fringes of my grandmother's last days, now at 37 I have a front row seat. I have sat with her as she as she told me plainly, with overwhelming love how much I mean to her, her hopes for my future. She has talked openly about how ready she is for her imminent end while gently holding my hand, imploring me not to be sad as my tears of fear and denial fell freely.
With Mauraid now, I am again a child.
When it first became clear that Mauriad was heading towards her last days, I wanted to pull the emergency brake. I wasn't ready, I needed more time to prepare for the truth. But life, as we know, and death, are just not like that. You don't get to choose what you're a part of. You can only choose to participate or withdraw. I love her too much to withdraw...so, here now I find myself walking into the water with her.
Every step that I'm taking with her fills me with terror, dread, fear, knowing that I am walking towards an eventual end where she is no longer walking beside me. I cannot shake that same terror I felt when I realized I would not have my grandmother anymore. I am full of selfish fear of letting go. But it’s a whole different thing when you know full well that your fear of letting go is completely futile. The heart wants what it wants, and Mauraid wants to go. And go she will.
My friend's mother said that working through suffering together is one of the most beautiful parts of being human.
Seeing the fraction of what I have seen, I know that to be true.
I have seen what strong stuff this woman is made of.. In her final days, she has proved to be stronger than the sum of all of us. She is ready. Seeing unwavering resolve every day is challenging my fear of letting her go, like grease slowly working its way into a long-rusted hinge.
I realized that as much as part of me wishes that I could detach like my 16 year old self and hide from the grownup realities of death, I'm mostly glad that I'm bearing witness to these adult experiences. I don't feel any more grownup for having seen them, I certainly don't enjoy them while they are happening, but I am beginning to understand that maybe my fear of death is more an echo from my childhood, a last remaining vestige of youth; the more time I spent with Mauraid in her final days, the more it seems to me that age and a certain kind of wisdom turns that childhood monster behind the closet door into a new brightly-lit doorway out of the darkness...a place where death becomes a well-lighted passage out of the dark, sad, lonely wilderness that is terminal illness.