Valentine’s Day has grown into a mega-holiday celebrating romantic love, but that’s just the commercial side of it. The very first red satin heart-shaped box of candy I gave anyone was when I was just a kid, and I bought it for my mother. Love is love–the object isn’t the issue.
Growing Into Love
By Kim Triedman, author of The Other Room
Let me just say this: my mother-in-law and I were never peas in a pod. When it came to matters of instinct and temperament, she and I could be depended upon to fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. She had a biweekly manicure appointment; I bit my nails until they bled. She loved working a crowd; I preferred working my garden. She was a neat-freak; I kept a house the police once mistakenly assumed to be ransacked.
She liked to give advice. I didn’t like that she liked to give advice.
Her name was Gloria, and somehow it was perfect: she was Glorious – splendor itself – a kind of heralding of trumpets. When she walked into a crowd, the sun magically fixed its face on her. Despite her diminutive stature, her style in all things was bold and purposeful: she was blunt in both manner and discourse; shameless in her ability to bend rules in her direction. In her dress and decorating she favored strong patterns and metallics, and her hair was clipped and dried into an actual “hairdo” every Saturday morning by a young woman who became an inexplicable fixture at Passover dinners.
The first time I met Gloria, years before she became my mother-in-law, I tromped into her white-glove-ready house with my painter’s pants on. It’s possible her son and I had been at the beach or having sex or both: in my recollection I am sweaty and sand-stippled, my wild hair whipped into a whole other dimension of wildness. The first thing I registered was the dining room table: oversized and modern – a veritable ark of marbleized gold – it was the very embodiment of good taste to my 19-year-old eyes (how precisely I came to this conclusion remains a mystery to me; perhaps some complex formula involving volume x shine). And this was the same precise moment she registered the very embodiment of me: gritty, barefoot, tongue-tied – as out of place in that dining room as a yak might have been.
But she was gracious to a fault, in the ways she knew to be gracious. She sat down with us at the golden ark, offered us roast chicken from the night before. She asked a lot of questions, to which I stumbled over a lot of answers. She smiled, bright and hard, but it was obvious from the get-go I was not cut from her cloth. She looked at me in the way a scientist might stare hard into the eyes of a chimpanzee, trying to assess both its nearness and its distance.
Six years and a wedding later, we made it official: Gloria and I became in-laws of the mother-daughter variety – joined, as they say, ’til death do us part. During that time, we began to know each other: though she never fully understood me, she made room for my differences, and above all else I think I amused her. I did the same thing: as I gradually took in the entirety of her, I found – across the great divide of our separate inclinations – much to admire. Her occasional blind-spots in sensitivity were more than offset by her good intentions and giddy humor. I still bristled at her intrusiveness and complained periodically to my husband. She could be guilt-giving, which made me crazy. And I’m sure at times she would have preferred a daughter-in-law who slipped more seamlessly into her style of living (or at least dressed like she did). But we accommodated one another and respected one another. We found our moments of grace.
And then the babies came.
You see my mother-in-law needed a granddaughter. Or at least she needed to shop for one. Having raised three sons, she sometimes seemed to be holding her breath for the next generation as an antidote to all that testosterone. Hearsay has it that when my first daughter was born, there was a scream so loud from the waiting room that someone thought a code had been called.
In short order two other daughters followed: an explosion of pink. There was suddenly an abundance of little girls in our family and not enough dresses in the world to clothe them. As a grandmother, Gloria came on like a well-intentioned pit bull. The more I protested, the more tulle and lace showed up at our doorstep, the more smocking and puffing and patent leather. And there was more: there were visits to the beauty parlor for tiny mani-s and pedi-s, there was a tea party at the Ritz (really?!) and Barbie dolls at birthdays (arghhhhhh). And there were all those God-awful toys: implements of parental torture – LOUD, every one – and every time we showed up at Gloria’s there were more of them, as though they secretly procreated when we were away. A dinner at grandma’s often felt like a year in front of the speakers at CBGBs.
Anyhow, the girls grew up, as girls will. They adored her, each in her own way. Gloria and I grew old (me) and older (her). With the years, and through the girls – whom she loved fiercely – our relationship became close. I spoke to her nearly every day, and together we shared in the brief wonder that was my children’s childhoods. Her greatest hope, she often said, was that she would someday dance at their weddings. Though she and I still sniped, and could be depended upon to give each other presents that would end up in the re-gift closet, we became family to one another.
Gloria’s health started to decline seriously when my youngest was in high school. She’d struggled with illness her entire life, beginning with severe colitis in childhood, colon cancer in her 40s, and – from her 60s onward – everything from diabetes to renal disease to congestive heart failure. She’d had most of her colon removed and three coronary arteries replaced. Over time, she spent years of days in doctors’ offices, endured untold surgeries, but she never felt sorry for herself and she never let it get her down. She was a poster-child for resilience – so relentlessly alive that she seemed, to all of us, indomitable.
At some point in her late 70s, Gloria started bleeding internally. Without warning, her red blood cell counts would drop to precipitously low levels. Given the various insults to her GI system over the years, it was hard to know precisely where the bleeding was coming from and how best to manage it. She had weekly transfusions, and she negotiated so many prescriptions and self-care regimens she scarcely had time for anything else. She went through periods where she was rushed to the ER several times a week, undergoing painful procedures on a regular basis just to try and stem the tide. Often these trips were preceded by her passing out alone in her apartment, covered in her own blood.
During her last few years, Gloria and I spent a lot of time together. I was one of two in the family with a flexible schedule, so I often accompanied her to doctor’s appointments or met her at the hospital. I knew that she felt better having me around. I ferried her to transfusion appointments and sat with her in emergency rooms, wanting to be there when the doctors arrived so I could help translate what was going on. But often we just met for lunch, a reminder to both of us that life was more than just beating back death. It was our way of building some normalcy into her days, something to dress and get her nails done for, a way to be out among the living. We always talked about the kids, but we were also gently scratching beneath that surface, offering bits and pieces of ourselves we had never shared. She told me things I’m quite sure she’d never told anyone else.
By the time the doctors made the decision to stop treatment, Gloria had been living half-in and half-out of the hospital. She’d lost considerable weight, and her thinking was becoming increasingly compromised. It was now too much for her just to make the trips to and from the ER. After they told us, she and my brother-in-law and I huddled together in a hospital coffee shop. The fight, it seemed, was over. She didn’t cry, sitting there in the cheap café chair under the blue fluorescent lights, but she seemed to shrink to half her size.
Hospice was called, and I found myself at her apartment every day, often for the whole day and into the night. In the mornings I’d bring her favorite cheese pastry, the one that for years she wasn’t supposed to eat. At the beginning, she still seemed pretty much herself, with a modicum of independence and, in flashes, her old sense of humor. She no longer felt able to see her beloved friends; she needed to close ranks, to narrow her focus and conserve her emotional energy. We passed the time just sitting in her den, talking and not talking.
There were moments when I found myself overcome, and I didn’t try to hide it. We were both facing this thing, and we never pretended otherwise. We both knew she would never dance at her granddaughters’ weddings. Sitting next to her on the couch, I’d drop my head on her shoulder and cry quietly, just needing the physical contact. She’d put her shrunken hand on top mine and let me. I told her she was my other mother, and I meant it.
In the end, she was not afraid. And neither was I. I needed to be there; I needed to be with her through the hard work, to hold her hand and stroke her hair and put my head next to hers. And in all that time, there was nothing I had to do or see or feel that I wouldn’t repeat a hundred times over again if I had to. It was a privilege – a gift – to be that person, something she gave me even as I lost her. I helped her to die, and in so doing she helped me to live. She was my mother-in-law, and I loved her fiercely.
Ed. Note: Those last two lines so perfectly summed up what I felt on helping my own mother to die. It was the last thing she taught me, not to be afraid of death.
