that evening sun

I'm still trying to come up with a memory of a time when she wasn't being a royal pain, one time when she had a good word to say about, to, or for me. Not coming up with any reason whey I feel so helpless now, watching her sink so swiftly into the effects of last Tuesday's stroke.

She's the woman who ruled everyone else, my husband's mother. There was no use arguing or presenting your side of anything. She was right and you were wrong and that was that. The Bible likely said so. As did some weird logic that none of us could ever make into sense.

Now she can't rule herself. Her mind wants to say one thing and another says itself instead. She walked into the hospital under her own steam on Wednesday, but by evening, she could no longer stand un-aided and today, she can't stand up at all, she is not sure of her surroundings, she doesn't know the people who come to see her and her words amble off over a hill and around a bend, when she can find any words at all.

It's as if all that boxing everyone in all these years, all that structuring of every single thing around her, all that reconstructing the world to match her idea of how it should be  has used up all the organizational skills she had in stock. Now she can't organize an entire sentence.

I want to recall good things about her. One thing that stands out is that she always gave everyone things. Whether they wanted them or not. You couldn't leave her house without a bunch of canned goods, couldn't leave her kitchen without a second helping and one wrapped to go.

She was always buying second-hand clothes for her grandkids. "These clothes are clean -- they were from good church-going people."  She stockpiled everything, saved every scrap of anything, and nothing ever slipped past her notice. If there were problems, she tried to solve them. Her ideas were never practical, and you couldn't argue your way out of agreeing with her. But she meant well.

I feel kind of lost. There were times I didn't know what I thought until I'd hear the exact opposite coming from my mother-in-law. She could set things right simply by saying them all wrong.

Of course, we never told her that. We learned to smile and nod and get the hell out of there so we could shake our heads to clear our thoughts, repeat the latest malaprop that had come out of the conversation and get on with doing exactly what she'd pretty much ordered us not to do under any circumstances.

If only we could ask her now to set us right by telling us what's wrong.

She hugs the telephone to her ear and asks her 55-year-old bed-fast daughter if she wants to go out in the yard and play. When asked how many children she has, she answers, "Three. Two boys and two girls."

Yes, it is from the stroke and her confusion, but to those of us who've been around her the longest, these answers are not nearly as strange as some of the advice, directives, and outright orders she gave when she was younger and in her right mind. I can say this, she lived her life by her own rules and no one ever talked her into or out of something she'd decided.