Snakeskin Journey

While entering the hospital yesterday to fetch my recovering mother home, I received an urgent text message from my brother-in-law, John.  Rushing out to call him, he told me that my beloved Lenore had died in the night.  After packing to come here with thoughts that my mother was dying, after seeing her through surgery with hopes of full recovery, my seemingly healthy but aged mother-in-law dies.  Below are some initial thoughts on Lenore:

I met Lenore when I was, as she frequently said, “a sweet, darling girl of fourteen”.  She was the mother of Mike, a friend from school and someone who was at the center of the social group I was circling.  ”Fascinating” really did describe this woman—I’d never met someone like her.  She exuded a crazy zest for life and took such personal interest in each person she met that one felt incredibly special in her presence.  We talked for hours during my high school years and I poured out my thoughts to her even as I poured out my heart to first one son and then another—I even tested the water with a cousin along the way.

Marrying Mike put the finishing touch on my already sealed membership into Lenore’s family—from the very beginning I called her my “Mother-in-Love”, rejecting the harsh undertones of the term mother-in-law.  I have often told my children that this family could give way to a terrific page turner of a book.  The only thing I’d have to do is change the names to protect the guilty!  And the core, for me at least, would be Lenore.

Lenore’s dialogue was never to be trusted when fact-checked, but for color and imagination her stories got high marks.  One of the best things about my friendship with her was our laughter.  I could blatantly tease her about her “selective memory” of events and we would end up roaring with laughter, sometimes to the point of tears.

She was quite the hostess and I learned much from observing her graciously open her home to international students, university staff and students, farm folk from tiny Cobden, and relations from all over the world.  They were all welcome in Lenore’s realm—for in truth she was queen of the household (chickens, cows and dogs included) whether the title was acknowledged by her oft unruly sons or not.  Her husband adored her, as did family and friends.

Over the past year or so, Lenore and I have talked often on the phone.  Her memory was going and she would repeat herself, asking me “WHEN are you coming to see me?!?”, several times in a conversation.  It broke my heart a bit each time, but I’d tell her how much I would love to be there and she would tell me how much she loved me…and how she recalled first meeting me when I was “a sweet, darling girl of fourteen”.

Oh, my dearest Mother-in-Love, I will miss you so.  You have brought love and life to our lives and what better gift is there than that?