By Bethany Getz
“Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end.” J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Struck by an unknowing hand in the dark, the delicate goblet tilted, fell to its side, and shattered. I heard it from the bedroom where I was slipping on my shoes. My teen daughter came to explain she had not seen the wine glasses lined up on the counter ready to be washed; my husband swept up.
Later, washing up dishes from dinner, I realized the broken glass was one of the last goblets that had belonged to my husband’s mother. How strange that this delicate glass lasted longer than my mother-in-law. How fitting that the fragile object shattered instantly whereas the woman proved too strong to break.
Ruth died in August of 2020, as bad a time as any to make the passage. She went after a brief but terrible illness caused by pandemic isolation. On the day when we woke up to news of her death, I turned over in bed and cried for not having been there and for the sorrow of loss without the comfort of goodbye. While weeping, I remembered the moment when I first knew how her end might come to be, what disease would take her away. But who could have foreseen the barrier of a worldwide pandemic casting a terrible shadow over her last days?
It was a hot afternoon in July of 2017 when I first had an inkling of what was to come. Ruth called to ask if she could pick up my three daughters for a trip to the mall while I rested with their new baby brother. Three little girls eagerly brushed their hair and found shoes; then they piled into the backseat of their grandma’s Nissan. Fifteen minutes later my phone rang. It was Ruth, asking for directions to the mall. She couldn’t find her way back to the freeway.
This woman had worked as a home health nurse for years, zooming up and down the freeways of San Diego County until she retired at seventy-three. Finding her way from point A to point B was second nature to her. Yet on that hot July afternoon, she was confused. She said she was afraid to open Google Maps on her phone; she asked me if it would cost a lot of money. My heart beat a little faster, but my voice was calm as I asked her where she had stopped. I told her to stay put while I came to her. I would drive ahead of her to the mall. The baby and I didn’t need a nap, after all, I tried to laugh it off, to reassure her. We needed to get out.
By the time I found her car waiting in the grocery parking lot, I had put together other clues from the past year and knew: it had come for her at last. The oldest of eight children, she would be the third of her siblings to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Ruth lived out the same threadbare story of every sufferer of this disease. The slow shattering of her mind pulled her away from her loved ones as if she were pulled by the tide returning to the sea. Once the disease began, it came in waves, pulling Ruth farther away, but she did not go without a struggle against the dark water. She went as she had lived—holding onto her loved ones, singing hymns and praying, wanting to be of use—though too often overcome with a gnawing anxiety that grew as her memory shrank.
One of the funny things about in-laws is that though they are in a parental relationship with you, you only know them as an adult. Your spouse has experienced their parenting and known them when the parent-child relationship is—for better or for worse—as close as that of monkeys swinging their clinging young from branch to branch. But lacking the shared bond of animal closeness between parent and child, the relationship to in-laws can feel like a carefully choreographed dance. You move that way, I go this way. Now we meet in the middle. In the early years of my marriage to her son, my mother-in-law danced the dance well. She was kind, supportive, yet restrained.
But when I got mysteriously sick more than ten years ago now, that polite yet distant relationship with Ruth evaporated. First, I had an unbearable stomach pain; within days, I felt like a prehistoric museum artifact: carefully examined, imaged, and set aside as a mystery. I was twenty-eight and terrified by my sudden loss of health. Finally, my mother-in-law, the experienced nurse, stepped in. She directed my husband to drive me to a different hospital, the best in the region, and the one where she worked as a nurse. Ruth met us there in the middle of the night and stayed with me all night until she saw me settled into a hospital room and medicated into sleep in the early morning.
Ruth was right about where I needed to be. I finally got a diagnosis, treatment, and began recovery. While I was in the hospital, Ruth pitched in taking care of my two-year-old daughter. They bonded while playing dolls, shopping, and baking. When I came home, the dynamic of the extended family was changed. My parents, my husband, my daughter, my in-laws—everyone had been united by the need to get me through a health crisis and take care of my child. I gratefully collapsed into their strength.
No longer a partner in a careful dance, Ruth became a pillar of the house that built itself around me as I aged into a more mature motherhood. She came to stay when my second and third children were born. She listened to every tiny tidbit of news about the kids with intent interest. She encouraged me to have confidence as I re-entered my career. She read everything I wrote.
The day that I realized she could no longer be that support for me, I resolved to support her instead. But, as so often happens in life, intention and reality never came together as I hoped. Either I was in the wrong place to help, or Ruth needed help I could not give. As her disease worsened, my husband and his brothers helped their parents come to the decision to move to out of state to live with their oldest son. Geographically removed and increasingly adrift on the sea of memory loss, Ruth was now past my reach. Most days, she was already gone.
We visited her, of course. It was a five-hour flight, but with our four children we made it several times before the pandemic. On our last visit, we had spoken to her on the phone many times, telling her we were coming. Each time she was pleased. But not as heart-breakingly happy as when she opened the door of her assisted-living apartment.
She gasped and tears ran down her face. She reached for her grandchildren and whispered, “God knew I needed to see you. I love you so much.”
How cruel that what she needed most she could not have for the last year of her life.
Yet, by the lasting strength of her love for her family, Ruth managed hold onto us. Our last phone conversation concluded with her telling my oldest daughter, the one she had cared for while I was sick in the hospital all those years ago, “I love you. Never forget that. I love you.” Indeed, when all else was lost, when she was so far away from us and moving farther every day, Ruth had never forgotten her loves.
When I think back to the day when I first knew my mother-in-law had Alzheimer’s disease, I know that I saw the road ahead of her in part but not in full. I did not see how little I would be able to help her. I did not see how the road would lead to her dying alone, and my husband, our children, and I unable to say goodbye. But I also did not see the strength concealed in the woman as she traveled her lonely road to the end; I did not yet know how strong her love would prove to be, and that it would be there when everything else was gone. It is there still.