The real purpose for my trip to Minnesota was to visit my mother-in-law.  I suppose this is no longer her correct title, since her son and I divorced many years ago.  But she has been a part of my entire adult life, and of my son's lives, and when I heard that her illness was serious I had to visit.

I hadn't seen her in a few years, although we talk often on the phone.  It may just be age, but it seemed to me that she was smaller than before.  Not shorter -- she is still taller than I am -- and not thinner, although she may have taken off a few pounds with all her hospital stays.  But that wasn't it.  She was pale, and feeble and sort of withered.  She has always been a powerful presence, and that was gone.

But she was still herself.  She questioned the validity of every test and the necessity of every medication, she resisted getting up to walk down the hall, found nothing good on tv, and assured us that no illness is so severe that it is worth eating hospital food.  When I saw her she understood everything and remembered everything.

And, especially when the two of us were alone, she did want to talk.  We talked about her grandchildren -- about Matt graduating from college, and how much he enjoys his work, and about Dan taking advantage of the freedom of youth, traveling the world and being in plays and experiencing life in a way that is tough to do when one is older. 

We talked about the past, mostly.  We laughed about the day that we first met, when she and two of her sons had come to have lunch with me and Michael.  I had grown up in a family that put decorum ahead of all other values, and my soon-to-be inlaws were quite astonishingly different.  They bickered and bantered.  They talked loudly.  They cursed openly.  Halfway through lunch, some light-hearted dispute resulted in one brother being pushed out of his chair onto the floor.  Elaine simply laughed, and scolded them in a way that made clear that she really enjoyed all of it and didn't for a moment think they should behave differently. 

And somewhere in all that reminiscing she looked at me and said, "Why is it that we got along so much better after you and Michael got divorced?"  It was true, but it surprised me that she had noticed it.  And, what could I say?  We had the problems that most mothers and daughters in law have.  She was nearly fifty, with experience at being a mother, wife, housekeeper and adult.  I was not yet twenty, with experience in none of those things.  Like most mothers-in-law, she could see that disaster was inevitable if she did not explain to me how things should be done.  And like most young people, even when I had no idea what I was doing, I didn't want her advice.

Things had gotten a lot better even before the divorce, actually, which is all I told her.  We were both older, and wiser, and understood each other better.    It's also true that the divorce changed the dynamic between us, for reasons I don't fully understand, and that don't really matter now.  The important thing was that it did get better, and even when it was difficult, I still liked her. 

She was in many ways the leader of her family, and always a force to be reckoned with.  She was intelligent and capable and capricious and infuriating and no matter how little she had, she would share it with you. 

I headed home today, and while I was at the airport I got word that she had taken a turn for the worse during the night, and is not likely to live more than another day or two.  She will be with her sons and her grandsons at the end, which is what she would have wanted more than anything.  __________________

Epilogue -- Elaine passed away a couple of days after I wrote this.  Knowing there was not much the doctors could do for her, she asked to go home, and the hospital arranged for her to be moved.  She died in her own house, in her sleep, after having had a chance to see all her family and friends in the last few days.