Weeks

In-laws are weird, at first. You get married, and all of a sudden you have all of these new people who are family. If you’ve been with the person you marry for any length of time, hopefully you’ve had a chance to develop some sort of relationship with the rest of their family before the wedding. John and I dated for seven years before we got married, so I knew his parents and his sister pretty well. Still, it was an adjustment, being married. I had to get used to new family traditions on the holidays, to different ways of interacting (every family has its own unique dynamic) and to add a whole new layer of family to the way I looked at my world.

A couple of months after our wedding, John’s mom Nora reached out to me, and suggested that we start having lunch from time to time. She’d come meet me at work, and we’d go to the Corner Bakery. I’d have the mozzarella and red pepper sandwich, and she’d get a muffin and some coffee. We’d chat, and eventually I’d have to go back to work. Sometimes she’d call me just to talk on the phone. I got to know her better over the last five years than I did for the first seven. We went from being people who liked each other and cared about the same person (John) to being people who cared about each other.

She’s been ill with lung cancer for a couple of years, and today we learned that the cancer has spread to her brain. She only has weeks left to live. Their hope is to keep her as lucid and free of pain as possible in the time she has left.

It’s so very sad. There are so many things I never learned about her. I don’t know how she and John’s dad met, for example. Or how she ended up coming to the United States from England. Or what it was like growing up in England during World War II (I do know that while she was sent out to the country during the Blitz, she never went through the back of a wardrobe to a magical land. I asked). We had talked about going to London together, and maybe even Paris. She loved France, and sometimes we’d try, hesitantly and a bit self consciously, to speak French to one another. When John and I do have kids, they won’t get to know their Grandma Nora. Yet another loss to chalk up to infertility.

And then there’s John. As sad as I am about this, he’s losing his mom. I can’t even think of the prospect of my mom dying without panicking, and here he is, facing it head on. I don’t know how to help him. I know I have to be the strong one, but this is something that I can’t fix or make better in any way. So far all I have provided is a sympathetic ear, and junk food. I’m really good at buying junk food. I love him so much and I hate to see him hurting. I hate to see his mom dying. It helps, a little, to believe in rebirth as we do. To think that we’ll see her again in another life. But not quite enough. I'm not ready to say goodbye, but I guess I don't have a choice.