Dear Blog:
It has been a while. I have so much to tell you. First, I
must give you my excuse for leaving you so rudely and suddenly, without even
saying goodbye. There are lots of cool excuses out there that people use to
explain long absences and missing work. I can’t lie. The dog did not eat my
blog. Though, I am sure she would have loved to gnaw at the corners of my now nonfunctioning
MacBook. My computer died last January. I am using my teenage daughter’s NONMAC
computer to write this. But that is not my excuse.
My mother-in-law is dead. I stopped blogging because after eleven-and-a-half years of taking care of a dying woman - she actually died. Things got pretty
crazy near the end. The last year was extremely challenging. The last two weeks…
well, I don’t think I will ever recover from that. How is it that you never
hear about post-traumatic stress disorder for people that have watched someone
close to them slowly, painfully die? She died exactly one year ago last Sunday,
at home, while under the care of family and hospice. One whole year ago. I
guess it is time for me to pull it together and start my life for real this
time.
Before I move on, I must tell you the story about my only experience
with (human) death and the afterlife. One of the ways I coped with hanging out
with a dying woman for many, many, years was through humor. I confess, I made inappropriate
jokes about every mental lapse (mine and hers), nasty body function, and rude
hospital employee. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that forty-eight hours
before she died, as she struggled to stand and clutched the wall gasping for
breath, I made my belly button talk. The stress of death can make some people a
little chubby. While my mother-in-law wasted away, I had put on a few pounds. So, I pulled
up my shirt and squeezed the fat around my belly button and had it speak to my
mother-in-law directly. (My belly button has a high-pitched annoyingly cheerful
voice, if you are wondering.) It said, “Do I look fat?”
For someone who could barely catch her breath, my mother-in-law did a
great job laughing. She actually almost collapsed to the floor. Dying people
make great audiences. But that is not my story.
Lonna (her name), died early on a Friday morning. Her
daughter was in the next room sleeping. We were taking shifts and for once I
got lucky. We had been speculating for years over who would be the one to find
her dead. Since I was the primary care provider, and I tend to have shitty
luck, I just assumed it would be me. It wasn’t. (I am saying this in a sing-song
happy voice, by the way). So, I got the call from my sister-in-law that morning
and after dropping the kids off at school, I joined her at the bedside of my
dead mother-in-law. I want to say she looked peaceful. Isn’t that what they
always say? But Lonna did not look peaceful. If you ask me, she didn’t look all
that thrilled to be dead. There was a bit of a, “Shit, that really sucked” look
about the mouth. But we were deeply grateful she wasn’t suffering any longer.
We spent the morning picking out the outfit she was to be
buried in. There was a small debate about the necessity of underpants. I
started making inappropriate underpants jokes that I will not repeat. Then I
heard her laugh. From behind me I HEARD MY MOTHER-IN-LAW LAUGH. It was not
spooky at all, it was normal. The timing was perfect. The sound of her laughter
was totally accurate and of normal volume. It became clearly obvious to me what
was going on. We fucked up, she was not dead.
Wrong. We checked, she was for-sure dead. My sister-in-law didn’t
even hear her laugh. Ghostly stuff usually freaks me out. Not this time. It
seemed normal. As I move forward from this experience, and finally get on with
my own life, I do take comfort in knowing that after everything I went through, and no matter how many people I just offended, at least the dead person thought I was funny.
