An Open Letter to My Husband's Sisters
An open letter to my husband’s sisters,
I didn’t believe your mother. I could not believe that she was setting all of you up to wound each other and destroy your relationships after she was gone. I was flabbergasted that she could not be talked out of it no matter what I said, when she changed her will and chose not to notify any of you because she didn’t ‘want to hear it now. You all can sort that out after I’m gone.’ I was appalled when your father, 24 hours before he died called your brother and me to his room and with anger in his eyes demanded that we promise to ‘protect your mother’. WTH? From what? From who? All he would say was ‘you know what I’m talking about.’ All I could figure was his great fear of dying in a nursing home being transmitted to his wife. I have spent countless hours in the last five years assuring your mom that no one was going to let her be cared for by strangers. None of you would want that. Her fear has never abated. She watched all of us very closely while we were helping as your father was dying. Something that happened during that time convinced her that given the added responsibility of her care you would institute her and her only hope of staying in her home was her son. She made him promise repeatedly. Even now, everything she says and does is motivated by unrelenting fear that she can push her family far enough to ‘give up’ and send her away. You can’t conceive of how much I hate being wrong, but you have proved her right. Given the responsibility of her, you would have chosen institutional care for her. It doesn’t make you wrong. It doesn’t make you bad children. It simply proves her intuition of your inability to do what she wants. And it certainly doesn’t mean she loved or trusted any one of you more or less. It proves that she knew enough about your lives and burdens to know that you weren’t going to be able to do what she wanted. And it proves that she knew that her son is incapable at the heart of this to break his promise to either her or your father. And neither of them are ‘here’ to try to make you understand the reasons for their actions.