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My mother-in-law is dying. Was the war over her tchotchkes worth it?

2023-12-19 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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“Where is it?” I mumbled, volume rising.

“Where the [heck] is it?!”

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I was rummaging through red and green bins looking for the horrible snowman sofa pillow my mother-in-law gave me on our first Christmas together, a few decades ago.

She’s not coming for Christmas, which is why I usually grit my teeth and put it out. This year, I didn’t have to. My husband was about to board a plane to California, to preside over her death.

Merry Christmas.

As I propped it up on the sofa, where he would see it on his way out the door, my resentment of the snowman was waning.

Because I’m beginning to understand why she sent it, and all the other things over the years that inevitably pushed my limits as they arrived, box by box, spotlighting the disconnect between what I needed and what she had to offer.

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I wish we hadn’t been such a cliché, nursing cartoonish mother-in-law and daughter-in-law tension.

We started out as friends. Two short blondes with gallows humor. Hers came from a life in health care — being married to a doctor, then as a nurse after the doctor left her and she had to find a career. I was a crime reporter.

“Was he an O or a Q?” she asked me, when I was describing a bloody crime scene at dinner one night.

I gave her a puzzled look.

“Was he like this?” she said, with her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth. “Or like this,” she said, her mouth open in an O.

She is an O right now. In a vegetative state for nearly a year.

It happened just before Christmas last year, when she decided to get dental implants instead of a bridge, another Southern California rage against the aging process. Old people back in her Long Island hometown got bridges that sometimes clacked and had to be cleaned in a glass by the bed. Not her.

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She stopped breathing during the surgery and was rushed to the hospital. Her eyes are open, her mouth sometimes, too. And she breathes. And that’s it.

We scrambled to her bedside last year for Christmas. My son draped a blanket from his college over her legs. We set some of the gifts we brought on her bed. We stroked her hair and put balm on her lips. Her sister flew in from New York and sat by her bed and read books.

I wanted to bring her some catalogues, stupidly.

She loved them. Piles everywhere throughout her house. She liked to place orders over the phone — she never figured out online shopping.

“How is the weather in Wisconsin?” she would ask the Swiss Colony woman sitting in the Dickeyville, Wis., call center.

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“Oh, Ohio! My brother lives in Ohio. Where do you live?” she said, befriending the patient Harry and David call taker in Hebron.

She talked and talked to the people on the other end of the line, and not only about the summer sausage assortment. She was lonely. She remarried her childhood sweetheart, with whom she had her only child — my husband. She left nursing, and he was always at work.

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Boxes and boxes showed up at our house. And they made me furious.

We were working as reporters with journalism salaries; our furniture came from thrift stores. We had milk crates for bookshelves and she’d send a set of mother-of-pearl cheese spreaders. Two of the same Waterford clock. A giant, bronze camel. Little silver cubes from Tiffany & Co. to hold name cards at the kind of dinner party we’d never throw.

“Sell it,” my friends told me, when I complained. I couldn’t.

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The Christmas stuff was the worst. I dreamed of the day I could decorate my house in tasteful, sophisticated jewel tones — eggplant Christmas stockings! A deep garnet, velvet Christmas skirt! White, fluffy, hygge pillows — like in the magazines, not her catalogues.

She flooded our house with needlepoint, sparkly, weird, expensive stuff and I growled every time I had to put it all out, because she was coming for Christmas. I finally spoke up over the set of farmhouse, festive chicken place mats and she wilted.

But I’m finally getting what it was all about. She was trying to build the perfect Christmas, the scene she longed for during her struggling divorce years, the marriage she wanted us to have.

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The stream of stuff mailed our way was her love language. And I wasn’t listening.

As a young mother, she was single, working long shifts in a hospital, hitting the clutch and downshifting expertly over the hills of San Francisco in her secondhand Volkswagen Rabbit, racing to make her shift, then speeding to get back to her kid.

She was fierce, her friends told me. Gutsy. Respected in the operating room. One of the best with a needle, no matter how deep or weak a vein was, she hit it like it was made of butter, you never felt a thing. She gave her latchkey son a list of chores — make your dinner, take care of the dog, take out the trash — while she was making it on her own, refusing alimony.

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That’s a woman I’d be great friends with.

In the later years, when we had political differences and I grew increasingly dismissive of her gifting gestures and she of my career, our common ground shrank to the two boys and one man we both loved.

Her condition worsened over the weekend, and she was moved to a hospital. The nurses caring for her quietly tell each other, “She was a nurse,” as they change shifts, and they are gentle with their sister.

They predict she’ll die by Wednesday.

And I’m putting all her Christmas stuff out, even the weird-faced, Dickensian carolers I had stashed deep into storage, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

The needlepoint, the sparkle, the Christmas tree plates will all be there, just as she wanted.

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