She Died Ten Years Ago Today...

I wasn't going to write about this, because I was pretty sure I couldn't pull it off. I'm not a writer, so I just have no clue how to tell the story of my mother-in-law's life and horrible death at the age of 52. How the hell do you find the words to describe someone who was and still is such a huge force in your life? How can you write the good without the bad?

My truth, my honesty can be brutal sometimes to people looking in, but I don't know how else to be. I can't seem to live any other way. So, I'll just tell you upfront that I loved this woman. Even though there were many times I could have strangled her for her selfishness, I accepted her flaws because I always understood where they came from.

Her name was Ellen. She was born and raised on a dairy farm with her four brothers, and she was the wild child of the family. After getting pregnant with my husband at 17, she was thrown out of high school, because back in 1963 you couldn't attend school in Podunk with a baby bump. When the boy down the street learned of the situation, he and his family denied that he was the father. That was all Ellen needed to hear, so she told them to "fuck off," left her father and mother standing there trying to reason with his parents, walked home, and she never looked back. She never tried to get them to accept her baby, and she never asked them for a dime.

Instead, she hopped in her car and drove all the way to Washington because she didn't feel like dealing with her father and the rest of the townie bullshit. She didn't have anywhere to go in Washington, and she had no idea why she ended up there other than that's where the car died. She just basically drove until the car broke down. Eventually, she had to call her father to come and get her, of course, because she had no money, but she had made her point. From then on, the family just accepted her pregnancy, welcomed her son and helped her to raise him on the farm.

Ellen went on to get her diploma and always managed to find really good office jobs. She bought a house in the next town over and married a guy named John when my husband was three. Being a hippy and never one to follow rules, she just decided to change my husband's last name to her new married name and neglected to have him adopted legally or file any paperwork whatsoever, which is why my husband has an alias with the IRS and Social Security that has required him to file tons of paperwork for years and go to court to finally have his name legally changed in his 30s, but at least Ellen didn't have to fill out any forms. I know she had them, because I found them when I was cleaning out her house after she died. She just never filled them out. That was Ellen.

My husband grew up believing that John was his father and was distraught when he died of a heart attack. Instead of telling her seven-year old son that he was not his real dad, she just let him go on believing until he was 13 and his aunt let it slip that John was not in fact his father. When confronted by her son, she handled it very badly, and my husband never got over the dishonesty. As he tells it, he never really trusted her again.

After John died, there was a string of bad boyfriends that she would bring into their home and their life, all losers, a couple of which smacked her around. My husband says he would keep a knife in his nightstand, because he wanted to kill the guys when they would get drunk and beat the shit out of her. In his fantasy world, he was going to be the one to save her, but since he was eight and ten when it happened, all he could really do was hide under his covers and put his pillow over his head.

I've always hated that part of the story, as I know the violence and fear changed the little boy in profound ways. I've seen tons of pictures of him from that time in his life, and he was not a happy boy. You can see the boy before and the boy after if you look through the photo albums. I've always tried not to judge her too harshly for it. It would never happen in my life because if you ever raised a hand towards me, you would be waking up dead or in a hospital, but she was very young and lonely and had zero self-esteem. She was raising a boy all alone at an age when you're supposed to be selfish, and selfish she was.

Thankfully, he had his grandparents and uncles to get him through the bad years, and when she finally wised up, mother and son went on to become close friends. He didn't accept her as a mother, because she never really acted like one, but they grew to have a pretty decent relationship. They told each other everything and hung out together like best friends.

Then along came Sassy. I actually knew Ellen long before we started dating, as she let kids hang out at her house and party. She never partied with us, but she let us have our fun and would make sure no one got too drunk and would see to it that everyone got home safely. She was the "cool mom." She let us drink, and she didn't care if you blasted the music or did burnouts in her driveway. She didn't care if you smoked pot, as long as no one smoked in the house. She would make us cupcakes and cookies for when we got the munchies. She would hide anyone from the cops if need be. Ellen was about the only mother I've known who really enjoyed having teenagers around.

All along, she really liked me. I would sit at the kitchen table with her, buzzed off my rocker, tell her about pretty much everything in my life, and she would go on about how she liked my strong attitude, my determination in school and my overall spunk as she called it; that is, until I started screwing her son when I was 17. Suddenly, it was like two female German Shepherds locked in a room together. At the time, I didn't understand the tension and tried to blow it off. Later on, I realized that as much as she liked me, she didn't want to share her son with me. She knew I was a force to be reckoned with, and she didn't want to lose her spot as top dog in his life. Of course, you can never beat the girl that's blowing your son, so it was a losing battle on her part.

Fortunately for all of us, I had no intentions of trying to come between them. He was never going to have to choose between the two of us, because I was not going to go there. I've always been close with my mother, and I was not about to wreck their relationship. Sure, I wanted to let loose on her when she would make her nasty little comments and try to come between us, but I never took the bait. I would just leave or hang up. She caused me a lot of stress over the next 15 years, but we also learned to agree to disagree and still have fun.

For all her faults, she was an amazing person. She had a ton of energy and was up for anything. If she wanted to go to Holland and no one else wanted to go, she went alone and made friends there. She went out dancing every Friday night, rode her bike all around town every morning, mentored two girls with Down syndrome through a program that helped them to get a place of their own and jobs, and she just lived life to the fullest.

She taught my husband to cook, clean up after himself, do laundry and grocery shop. She started charging him rent when he was 16, which I may not agree with, but he learned how to work hard in life and to pay his own way. She raised a good man despite all of the mistakes she made.

This day is a hard day for me every year. When someone you love dies senselessly because of a "mistake," you can't just focus on the happy memories, because there's a lot of anger and regrets that keep popping up. This day, like every October 8th since 1998, I get stuck on the things I/we should have done in the weeks leading up to her death.

I knew she shouldn't trust the doctor that she was listening to. I had spent over ten years at that point taking malpractice cases and seeing all too clearly that there are good doctors, bad doctors and ones who just make horrible mistakes sometimes. Sadly, he was a bad doctor, a doctor that played fast and loose with her life so that he could save the insurance company a lot of money.

I should have dragged her to the hospital that weekend. She was so weak she couldn't have even put up a fight, but she trusted him. She didn't want to hear it when I would question his treatment or lack thereof following her heart surgery, and my husband thought I was being an alarmist as usual. She told me that coming off her Coumadin so that she could have the procedure to get the fluid out of her lungs that had been building up for two weeks was not a problem. He assured her that it was safe. I knew that was wrong. I argued with her that she needed to get a second opinion, but she'd just dismiss it and say, "Oh, you don't trust anyone. He's a good doctor."

So, when I got the phone call from my husband telling me that a nurse had just called him to tell him he needs to get to the hospital right away but to drive carefully, I wasn't even shocked. He told me that the way the nurse talked to him sounded like she was dead. She was. We later learned that when the pulmonologist put the needle into her lung and took out the fluid, she took a couple deep breaths and said, "Oh, I feel so much better," passed out and died in his office right in front of her best friend. She had thrown a clot because she had gone off her Coumadin like her doctor told her to. Totally senseless, since she could have been put in the hospital and had a Heparin bridge during the procedure. She'd probably be alive and well today if he had admitted her.

That's why I still get angry, and that's why the regret is always going to be there for me. She should be here enjoying her grandson. All she ever talked about was wanting a grandchild, which drove me nuts, but she would have been a fun grandma for sure. I think she wanted a do-over because of all the mistakes she made with her son. I wish we could get a do-over, too.