My mother-in-law died some years ago at the beginning of August. Immediately afterwards she gave me my son-maybe that doesn’t make sense but I am sure of it. On her last birthday I made her a cake she liked, a victory when her illness made it hard to eat. She had five miscarriages before she had my husband so she could do that kind of biology trick-the one with my son, I mean.She was a devout Catholic the way people of that generation were required to be and my brother-in-law’s girlfriend worried she would disapprove of their unmarried pregnancy but I said she valued the right things and would be happy, and she was. With the girlfriend from Lima and I from upstate she never even cleared her throat or looked askance, and in this conformist society that’s not nothing.She grew up on the type of farm Greg Brown would call 5 acres of brush and trouble although it was also a livelihood for her whole family, and she did everything she was supposed to do in relationship to men I guess, all the housework for her bachelor farmer brother and her son until she was too sick. She went to school just long enough to become more or less literate and she made these giant holiday meals, a parade of pate on toast and croquettes and fries, fried on fries, for Christmas Eve and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s and my brother-in-law’s birthday. Nobody does any of that now. She was under 5 feet tall.When my husband and I got married we had a local photographer take pictures and my MIL printed all of them out and put them in albums. When she died we took the albums from her house because who else would want them really. Now my son likes to look at them every day and pick out the people he recognizes. Uncle P, Uncle I. Borja and Eneko. Uncle J. Grampa T-is dead. Gramma M-is dead. Aunt F-is dead. He reports the deaths as abstractions because they are still things someone else told him and he says gramma isn’t dead, mommy isn’t dead, daddy isn’t dead. When we bought our own apartment after living next door to my MIL for 6 years, we got a cat named Harriet. My mother-in-law didn’t understand English and she thought the cat’s name was Jarri Det, “I put it” in the Gipuzkoa dialect of Basque. The one word of English she learned from my husband was “traffic”. It is a relief to be swamped regularly with direct evidence that the Anglo-American universe taking up so much headspace online and inside my own head is meaningless to much of the world. My MIL used to sit on her balcony on Sunday around noon to watch the parade of Nigerians who dressed in bright colors for church. She was a seamstress briefly before her marriage and she wanted me to have her sewing machine when she died. Unlike my own father’s decline I was present for hers, from complications of cancer, a euphemism for a violent end with a long warning. She had the last rites and I wonder what the priest said. I still worry about my dad’s body getting cold in the winter where he is buried but I know my mother-in-law’s doesn’t. I know this with certainty.
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