Originally written November 22, 2013 but not posted – Petra, my former mother-in-law, is still in a nursing home.  

My (former) mother-in-law, the only grandparent my two sons have really ever known, is in a nursing home.  This evening my ex told me that she will now be receiving hospice care.  Just the term “hospice”, although I know they are a warm, wonderful, caring, giving organization, still gives me a shudder inside and all I can think is, Jesus, she’s dying.  Petra, my mother-in-law, is 91.  When I think about her objectively, she has had a good long life.  Up until probably a few years ago, she enjoyed good health and was able to get around on her own, still drove a car, got out and lunched with friends.  She used to tell me how hard it was to deal with all of her friends dying off, and that out of an original potluck dinner group formed back in the 1950’s, she was the only one left who wasn’t in a nursing home, or deceased.

I need to go and visit her, because I want to, but I have to get past my own fears to do so.  I don’t have a religious upbringing, and I never thought there was an afterlife where God will be sitting up at the pearly gates waiting to greet me.  If there is a heaven, I would imagine my God to be a wise-cracking young version of a non-pervy/non-rapey Bill Cosby, fatherly and funny, and he would offer me a martini (Ketel One, shaken hard enough to leave ice slivers, with blue-cheese stuffed olives, thank you very much) while giving me a live performance of his 200 mph sketch.

But if anything, I prefer to think an afterlife would be a nice surprise.  I think when we die, it’s probably like going into a deep, dreamless sleep.  And that’s it.  Lights out, shut the doors, let’s go home.  And that’s ok.  I like sleeping.  I would prefer to have dreams, however, given a choice, since I usually have some very entertaining ones.  Especially the ones where I can fly.  Those are always fun.  But most of the time I think it’s pretty much just silent sleep.  But I don’t like to think of it happening to me.

I’m pretty convinced that I’ll go out of this life with regrets, but I hope not to.  I’ll regret all the things I didn’t do or accomplish or felt I was too busy or too tired to do.  I may never learn any other foreign language other than my I-can-translate-WWII-movies German, and I may never learn to play the piano or develop a singing voice that doesn’t send the cats diving under the bed.  But I hope I do, and there is this part of me that always feels that I’ll get around to it.  Someday.

Yet how does it feel when one’s life is quickly running out of somedays?  If I have the luxury of as long of a life as Petra’s, I have 41 years left to go – almost as much as I’ve already lived.  It would be amazing to have only lived half my life at this point, when it feels so full already.

I’m trying hard to develop a mindset of gratitude, always, and reminding myself that there is much to be said for having gone to one’s grave having been nothing more than a good person who loved and was loved by others.  So much these days is focused on success, striving, a legacy, a lasting impression … to the exclusion of forgetting that it’s okay to just try not to be an asshole and occasionally doing good for others is a pretty damn good thing all on its own.  Celebrities and politicians alike strive to do something memorable vs. doing something right, or just doing the right thing.

I wouldn’t say Petra is a particularly memorable person.  And I mean no disrespect to her in saying that.  She is a good person who, as far as I know, never knowingly set out to hurt or harm anyone, she went to church on Sundays, sorted her trash from her recyclables, kept a clean house, lived an honest and modest life.  I was never that close to her because I inherited my ex-husband’s baggage regarding his mom when I married him.  She could be a cheapskate and a busybody, and liked to always tell people how to do things.  She was convinced our older son started stuttering at age 2 because he either needed his skull adjusted by a chiropractor or he ate too much cheese.  Now that her grandsons are 14 and 12, the last time she took me aside, she expressed a dire concern that they really needed to be enrolled in some kind of summer program to teach them handwriting, and their lives were doomed to failure due to bad penmanship.  (I have to say, in many respects I agree with her, the lack of cursive writing training in schools is downright appalling nowadays.)  I took her quirks with a grain of salt when I was still married; once I was divorced, I really didn’t have to put up with them anymore.

In the years since my husband became an ex, I’ve waxed and waned on my relationship with Petra – I would make an effort to see her, only to be reminded that she still got on my nerves and to come away with a feeling of guilt that I was somehow befriending her behind my ex’s back and that would only increase the tension between us.  She would use a dinner out to Black Angus as a therapy session to tell me everything she found wrong with my ex’s girlfriend and their relationship, and I would come away with a mixed sense of gossipy glee and shame – because this was the kind of discussion she should really have with her son.

When I entered the family picture back in 1989, I was surprised to find that nobody in my husband-to-be’s family expressed much in the way of emotion. In retrospect, I should have taken that as a huge red flag – I grew up in an extremely volatile household, where feelings were expressed far too often and far too extremely – but to me it was a calm refuge, these folks all seemed so normal.  Except they didn’t hug each other at Christmas.  Or ever really told each other what was going on in their lives beyond the most shallow of events and emotions.  As I tell my sons now, when they are old enough to discern the personality differences between me and their Dad, that’s just how his family rolls.