Story of the Day 6/ 22/ 2014

My mother-in-law, my husband mother's, has died.

On Sunday evening , she was fine.
She ate dinner and complimented my father-in-law on the delicious meatloaf.
My mother-in-law had not been ill, but she was frail;
and over the last couple of years, my father-in-law had taken on more of the household chores, the cooking, the laundry, the dishwashing, that require standing.

So, she enjoyed the dinner her husband had made.
That was Sunday evening.

But Monday, she woke with severe abdominal pain and asked him to call the doctor.
The doctor said he should call 911.

Many hours and tests later, she was taken in for emergency surgery.

My husband flew out.
We live in Indiana and they live in New York; so he flew out
and he spent Tuesday with his father, at her bedside in the hospital.

Close to midnight, she died.
After the funeral, they came back here for shiva.
Shiva is the Jewish mourning ritual.
The immediate relatives, parents, siblings, spouses and children, stay in the house for the week and people come to visit them.
They come to cheer up the mourners, to listen to them, and to eat.
Hey, we are Jewish, eating is always on the list, except for Yom Kippur and a few other fast days.

So, they are here, and my father-in-law is understandably depressed having just lost his wife of 62 years.

Being depressed, he makes mention, every few hours, of wanting to join her.

This is a bit upsetting for my husband and my son, but I actually think it is pretty normal.
I think that many people feel that way when they lose the person with whom they have spent so much of their life,
but they do not always say it out loud.

In my father-in-law's case, however, he went so far as to ask my husband what would happen
if he took all of his almost full bottles of prescription medicines at one time.

My husband told me this a few hours after his father had asked him that question.

I said to my husband, " I hope you told him that it would give him terrible diarrhea!"

He did not.

My husband told his father it would case terrible constipation.
Apparently, that is even a bigger threat to an 88 year old man.

My husband is so brilliant!