Megs

My ex mother-in-law died just before Christmas.

I have been wanting to write about her but haven’t been able to find the words. I’m still not entirely sure I have them.

I found her to be a difficult woman when I was married to her son and difficult for different reasons when she stayed in my life after the divorce, because of course she was still very much the grandmother to my children.

Things were made easier and harder by the fact that she lived in Canada. Everything was complicated by distance. Most of the time she was far away. Some of the time she would be very near. Often too near. She would visit every few years and stay with me and my family rather than with her son. We developed a peculiar sort of intimacy that had the same language as family, but which both was and wasn’t actual family. I was with her son for a decade. I was with Megs for much longer.

Every time she came to the UK she would tell us that it was going to be her last visit, that she was too old to keep doing this trip. The last time she visited, I had just had a hysterectomy. She asked if it was a good time to visit. We said that it wasn’t. She came anyway. It was a very Megs move. She said she wouldn’t come again. We didn’t believe her, but for once it turned out to be true. The pandemic and a diagnosis of dementia saw to that.

All my dealings with Megs were intense. She was not a meek, vanilla sort of woman. She was bold and strange and dominated every event she was part of, whether it was about her or not. She would very much never take no for an answer. She once asked me if I wanted a hand woven Mexican wall hanging she had. I had learned by then that being polite wasn’t an option with her, so I firmly said no. Three weeks later I got an airmail package containing the awful, brown wall hanging ‘that you liked so much.’ That was Megs all over.

She could be rude in that breathtaking way that women of a certain class and age carry off so well. Conversationally speaking, you were always in for a wild ride and if you were in public with her, you needed nerves of steel. She would test every, last one of them. Part of me admired her ability to do and be exactly who and what she wanted to. She never seemed in the slightest bit ashamed of herself. Part of me thought she could have done with a bit of shame. It was always complicated.

No matter how complex my relationship with her was, there were some things that were simple and important and worth bearing witness to.

When I chose to leave her son and divorce him, she never once made me feel terrible about it and she was forthright enough for me to expect it. Not only that but she always made Jason welcome and accepted him as one of the members of our strange family/not family. When Oscar was born, she wrote us an email asking our permission to treat him as one of her grandchildren and she always did, loving him in the same way she did the girls and never, ever making him feel like the odd one out. She may have been a difficult mother-in-law but she was an exceptional nana and my children were never in any doubt that she loved them and was proud of them.

In the last few years, as the dementia took hold, I am reliably informed by the people who loved and cared for her, that she was happy. That’s not a Megs I ever met. The Megs I knew was tangled up in care and anger so twisted and sharp that it damaged most of the things it brushed up against, one way or another. The only time I ever saw that relax was when she was with my children. I think she gave herself permission to let go of some of her burdens then.

I like to think that the dementia robbed her of everything she never wanted in the first place; the fear, the anger, the resentment, the jealousies and the bad, bad memories that poisoned what should have been a much happier life. I like to think that for Megs, dementia was a blessing from the higher power she strongly believed in, that meant that she finally got to be happy and share it with the people she loved and couldn’t always show it to. What a strange piece of magic, and so wildly beautiful.

Go well, Megs. You always loved to travel. In the last few years you were blessed to travel backwards to the happy girl you used to be and now you are travelling far out to sea on your most audacious adventure. Thank you for loving my odd little family in the way only you could.