I miss her but I hardly knew her. She was devastated when my husband told her he was going to marry me - not necessarily because of me but because I dont think anyone could have been good enough for him. She cried through the wedding and afterwards kept crying and asking me look after him. It made me really sad. I know she was very attached to Austin - more so than her two older kids, and I know that they had been through a lot together but I wanted to be friends with her.
I looked at how my amazing, loving family scooped Austin up and loved him unconditionally, how they unquestioningly looked after him for 3 months while he wrote his thesis (and played with puppies!) My brother sees him as an older sibling and my extended family wrapped them in their love and within no time at all it was as if he'd always been there as a part of us.
But I wasn't going to be a part of his family. I wished she could smile and be happy for him. I wished she could love me. I wished she saw me as the person I am rather than the person taking her son away. I desperately wanted to be part of her life too.
During our honeymoon she collapsed and was taken to hospital to have her right kidney removed due to a massive tumour. We organised for her to go to a fantastic recovery home which had really good reviews. Only they treated her horribly. The day after she moved in the nurse complained to me that she kept asking for pain meds and she was only allowed them twice a day. The nurse was quite put out when I got cross - I knew she was in a great deal of pain - who wouldn't have been!? The next time we went to visit her, her arms and sides were covered with dark bruises from when they'd roughly given her a sponge bath. We complained, and then noticed that her hand cream, body lotion and face cloth were gone. Noone knew what had happened to them. The next day when we arrived, her face was swollen, she was tired and her lips and fingernails were blue. We called an emergency doctor who said she'd had a heart attack, he suspected the evening before. The nurses had ignored her pleas for help. We moved her out an hour later to a place which looked after her so well and she really began to recover.
But she never quite got there. She hardly ate and didn't put on weight. She was lonely and unhappy but wouldn't move to another care home closer to family. We wrote to her and sent her gifts from across the world but she didn't get better. Eventually Austin got the call to come home. For the next month he single-handedly nursed her as she got weaker and weaker. I was stuck at work - not being allowed time off can you believe! One day Austin phoned and said that one of her friends thought she was hanging on so she could talk to me so Austin held the phone to her ear and I talked to her. I told her I loved her, that I wished that I was there with her and that I would love Austin forever so she didn't have to worry about him at all! But by then she was too weak to talk and in her attempts to say something to me became frantic and desperate. I wish I'd told her that I'd understood - even though I didn't.
Two days later she passed away quietly while my husband held her hand.
I miss her. But I think that it's not really her I miss. I miss the potential of her. I miss not having had a good relationship with her. I miss never having the chance to have tea with her and chat about nothing in particular. I miss the fact that I will never have any parents in law. And I miss her even more when I see Austin's pain at the loss of her and I wish beyond anything else that I could make it better.
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