A Decade and a Dutch Oven

Before I start this piece, let me say how often I waver between whether I have rights in referring to Mary as my mother-in-law. I'll get stuck in a mental loop almost every time I ponder this. After all, Mary passed when I was still married to her son. Then he and I would divorce just three years after she departed, so it feels like his new wife is the one who would get the privilege of using that title. Yet can his new wife use that honorific if Mary isn't physically here?

For the sake of getting out of the mental loop, I will be referring to Mary as my mother-in-law for this piece.

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Looking back on the loss of my mother-in-law, I can still feel the ache down to my marrow.

An educator like myself, Mary and I could spend hours "talking shop". She wasn't very good at being on time for much of anything, from a casual lunch date to buttoned-up graduation ceremonies. But she did have a charming laugh, one that bubbled from her chest and paired well with her toothy smile. You could feel that laugh coming from the photo where she held our newborn daughter for the first time because laughing was her default for showing joy. She would flush red and slap your hand if you said something even slightly inappropriate in her presence. Yet Mary and her husband would noisily kiss and giggle any chance they had, forgetting that I could be in the next room, likely with her fingers in her ears despite wanting a love as youthful and sweet as theirs.

Mary and I shared a love of cooking, even if our food genres were a bit disparate. She would enjoy a salty biscuit or the spoils that came from a deep fry. I'd try to impress her with roasted cranberry citrus chicken or pesto pasta. I suppose it worked because there was never a meal she didn't enjoy at our house. She even started venturing into new recipes, especially those that would keep her husband around as long as possible. A quadruple-bypass surgery had humbled his eating habits, forcing fiber over fat. Both of our homes kept gardens and found bliss in preparing meals from our harvests. When a bumper crop of tomatoes came in one summer at our first house, Mary asked to come over so she could learn from me how to make pasta sauce from scratch.

It wasn't difficult to see that Mary and I had a great relationship as in-laws. One Christmas, she bought me my first Dutch oven. I had seen it in the store and talked about it, probably at one of our lunch dates after she apologized for running late. But for some reason, I wouldn't buy it for myself. Red was still my favorite color then, of which Mary was aware. So she bought the one cast in red enamel with an eggshell interior. I was elated for this gift. It felt like a true grown-up kitchen item, one that I knew I would commit to using even if the world fell to an apocalypse. The only thing better than receiving that gift from her was her laugh as she watched me open it.

That Dutch oven is still my go-to for every pasta sauce, every jam and jelly, every batch of chicken broth that my hands are compelled to produce. Not just because I feel it's important to stay close to the source of so many foods made in my home, but also because it helps me stay close to Mary's memory, even a decade after her passing.

Losing Mary was both sudden and slow. My then-husband got the call on a Saturday afternoon that Mary was in the hospital after suddenly dropping while on a run. EMTs performed CPR for half an hour before getting a heartbeat. She was first taken to a small hospital near her home and then life-flighted to Athens where a machine would breathe for her in CV-ICU for several days. Had it been a stroke? A brain hemorrhage? A heart attack? All were ruled out. No cause was ever determined.

Before September of 2015 and still since, I have not been witness to another human taking her last breath. I have not watched another estranged sibling show up in the 11th hour to place the blanket that got her through chemo over her sister's body for a comfort that the coma would deny. I have not met with another team of medical experts to discuss how the mass of white on a brain scan revealed just how severe the oxygen deprivation had been. I have not sat with another family to decide together whether it was time to turn off the machine that tethered the body to the Earth.

I have not again experienced the way Time keeps you in the fickle countdown that waits for Death to arrive, your body finding no rest in any of the postures you attempt to shape yourself into. You try to ignore Grief as Time dilates, experiencing the final hours of your loved one's life as full seasons. But Grief follows you to every quiet corner and wide open hospital lobby as you switch from pacing to sitting and back to pacing because She knows you need a hand to hold in the before, the during, the after.

And then there is Love. She also shows up in the before, the during, the after. Love had been there when Mary had asked us to have dinner at Cracker Barrel just two weeks prior to her collapse. Our daughter in my lap, Mary's son by my side, her husband at hers. We shared biscuits and fried okra, none of us knowing this would be our last meal together.

The Love that came during were the days of not understanding why Mary lay in CV-ICU as friends, neighbors, and co-workers turned up for us. They fed us. They brought changes of clothes for my underpacked sister-in-law who lived with us during the days of uncertainty. They cried in our kitchen as they realized their own mortality. They brought friends for our daughter to play with because she was too little to understand the gravity of it all. They refused to let us worry about anything at work and helped with caring for our dog. Love permeated through the numbness we felt. Love even had us as parents sleeping on the floor of our daughter's room during the chaos, the both of us in sleeping bags beside her toddler bed.

But then it feels like Love glitches in the after because Time violently rockets you through those days, the ones that inevitably come and you don't have a reliable foothold in the emotional climb. Making permanent decisions. Taking more visitors. Seeing you don't have enough space for another casserole in your freezer. Acts of Love toward the baby steps of task completion, toward self, toward others, yet feeling inconsistent because someone so significant is now absent and cannot be a part of what helps you get through it.

Somehow, you do. You eat the casseroles and walk the dog and drop your child off at daycare. Time promises you some version of healing and shrinking the new void to an acceptable size. Grief stays forever and promises to shrink herself, too.

The after is permanent now. There's nothing to be fixed or mended because the movies taught us that genies cannot grant the wish for resurrecting the dead. Everything that comes after just...does. Even the part when you finally get the time to sit with your husband to reflect on it all, and then he tells you, "All of this made me realize I still want more than what we have." So you spend the next three years limping through the steps toward divorce. Another loss. Another permanent action.

I try to reconcile losing Mary as her way of granting gentle permission for her son and me to find a life that bring us the most joy, even if it meant a life for myself on a separate path from his. There is, at times, the desire to reach out to Mary just so that we can have our familiar teacher talks or compare what's growing in the garden. So I pull out the red Dutch oven and a plan. The enamel bears a few chips around the handles, and I will forever fight the staining inside the pot. But having this object keeps her memory with me and inspires countless meals that keep her granddaughter's belly--and our pantry--full.

I miss you, Mary.