She was schizophrenic. Not violent; not sufficient to warrant hospitalisation, except when she screwed with her medication. Really just unpleasant, turning in an instant from amenable to thoroughly nasty, foul-mouthed, abusive, and accusing. Yet, to look at her, it was difficult to see the flaws illness caused. She had the appearance of a kindly, rotund elderly lady. At least, this is how I remember her; I haven’t seen her for several years, by my choice. During the last two years she has been pretty much bed-ridden with complications caused by diabetes.
My brother-in-law used to carry a photocopy of a letter, signed by the local police commander, confirming her condition. It was an essential component of his daily life, he used it to diffuse the many difficult situations he encountered when she would steal from shops, accuse friends and strangers of trying to kill her, and approach policemen with lurid tales of her husband assaulting her, or my wife or her sisters stealing her jewellery or abusing her. Some of the tales she told to complete strangers of sexual abuse would make readers of Lit. blush, we have lost count of the number of times my brother-in-law has been ‘arrested’ for physical or sexual abuse, though thankfully not in recent years, she actually became a legend in the part of the country where she lived.
She died eleven days ago, neither myself, nor my wife went to the funeral. I was in UK at the time, my wife in Ireland, we couldn’t have gotten there in time even if we’d been inclined to witness the funeral. We have both spent three days with my brother-in-law this week. Visiting what used to be their home for the first time since they moved there twelve years ago. Walking the town with him was an eye-opening experience. He has many friends; he is the type of person who makes friends instantly. All the people we met offered commiseration, then, they gave thanks that his wife had died first. We heard tales of her misdeeds from everyone, the abuse she poured on people who tried to help her, harrowing tales of night-time screaming – cries of ‘murder’.
Their apartment was a squalid mess. We spent two days restoring some order to the place, arranging for a cleaner to assist him in maintaining cleanliness, packing her clothes, ordering new mattresses – she was incontinent in recent years and her husband, a seventy-two year heart attack sufferer, was unable to keep up with the chores and the cleaning. He’d touched nothing since she died. He didn’t want anything touching until we spoke long into the night and made him understand he needed to recover his life.
The depth of his feelings for the woman who’d tormented his life for fifteen years was truly astonishing, and his attitude has made me look for something beyond her passing, to see her life had value, at least to him, though what he treasured was a memory encapsulated in photographs of a holiday they took in Porto Rico the year before her illness took hold. They were living in the USA at the time; he proudly showed me his citizenship certificate and his USA passport. And finally, we tore into shreds the half dozen copies of the letter attesting to her schizophrenia he carried in the jackets of each of his suits.
The whole business has left me numb. The ill feeling between her and us stems from before she became diagnosed as ill. When my wife’s parents became seriously ill (her mother was 48 when my wife was born) we uprooted, left a home and a business and moved to another country to nurse them. Over a five-year period, we buried my in-laws, two aunts, an uncle, and a cousin. We had to survive in a country neither of us had ever worked in, that was in political and economic upheaval – it was not long after the revolution – and raise our own daughter who was barely a year old when we moved. Not once during that period did our sister-in-law visit, and at the end, she accused my wife of failing to look after the family in order to ‘steal the family property’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you’ve ever nursed an elderly parent, you will understand when I tell you of the mixture of humiliation and love involved in cleaning a person too ill or too feeble to attend to their own hygiene. I remember the stoicism of my father-in-law as I cleaned him in the shower twenty years ago as if it were yesterday. He would stand erect as if posing for a 1920’s photograph, staring straight ahead trying to maintain what dignity he could muster knowing there was no other choice. During all those times, he only ever looked at me once; he had tears in his eyes.
How do I close this chapter? Do I forgive in death what I couldn’t forgive in life?
My brother-in-law used to carry a photocopy of a letter, signed by the local police commander, confirming her condition. It was an essential component of his daily life, he used it to diffuse the many difficult situations he encountered when she would steal from shops, accuse friends and strangers of trying to kill her, and approach policemen with lurid tales of her husband assaulting her, or my wife or her sisters stealing her jewellery or abusing her. Some of the tales she told to complete strangers of sexual abuse would make readers of Lit. blush, we have lost count of the number of times my brother-in-law has been ‘arrested’ for physical or sexual abuse, though thankfully not in recent years, she actually became a legend in the part of the country where she lived.
She died eleven days ago, neither myself, nor my wife went to the funeral. I was in UK at the time, my wife in Ireland, we couldn’t have gotten there in time even if we’d been inclined to witness the funeral. We have both spent three days with my brother-in-law this week. Visiting what used to be their home for the first time since they moved there twelve years ago. Walking the town with him was an eye-opening experience. He has many friends; he is the type of person who makes friends instantly. All the people we met offered commiseration, then, they gave thanks that his wife had died first. We heard tales of her misdeeds from everyone, the abuse she poured on people who tried to help her, harrowing tales of night-time screaming – cries of ‘murder’.
Their apartment was a squalid mess. We spent two days restoring some order to the place, arranging for a cleaner to assist him in maintaining cleanliness, packing her clothes, ordering new mattresses – she was incontinent in recent years and her husband, a seventy-two year heart attack sufferer, was unable to keep up with the chores and the cleaning. He’d touched nothing since she died. He didn’t want anything touching until we spoke long into the night and made him understand he needed to recover his life.
The depth of his feelings for the woman who’d tormented his life for fifteen years was truly astonishing, and his attitude has made me look for something beyond her passing, to see her life had value, at least to him, though what he treasured was a memory encapsulated in photographs of a holiday they took in Porto Rico the year before her illness took hold. They were living in the USA at the time; he proudly showed me his citizenship certificate and his USA passport. And finally, we tore into shreds the half dozen copies of the letter attesting to her schizophrenia he carried in the jackets of each of his suits.
The whole business has left me numb. The ill feeling between her and us stems from before she became diagnosed as ill. When my wife’s parents became seriously ill (her mother was 48 when my wife was born) we uprooted, left a home and a business and moved to another country to nurse them. Over a five-year period, we buried my in-laws, two aunts, an uncle, and a cousin. We had to survive in a country neither of us had ever worked in, that was in political and economic upheaval – it was not long after the revolution – and raise our own daughter who was barely a year old when we moved. Not once during that period did our sister-in-law visit, and at the end, she accused my wife of failing to look after the family in order to ‘steal the family property’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you’ve ever nursed an elderly parent, you will understand when I tell you of the mixture of humiliation and love involved in cleaning a person too ill or too feeble to attend to their own hygiene. I remember the stoicism of my father-in-law as I cleaned him in the shower twenty years ago as if it were yesterday. He would stand erect as if posing for a 1920’s photograph, staring straight ahead trying to maintain what dignity he could muster knowing there was no other choice. During all those times, he only ever looked at me once; he had tears in his eyes.
How do I close this chapter? Do I forgive in death what I couldn’t forgive in life?
