Gone and yet not gone

While I said I had blogged my last here, something has happened that begs my return.

Nathan’s stepmother has passed away.  She had a massive heart attack on Thanksgiving and died at the hospital Wednesday evening.

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you may know that Nathan’s mother died of kidney failure two and a half years ago.  His father was already seeing someone by Father’s Day. They announced their engagement in July and were married in September at a University of Michigan football game.

Nathan and I did not celebrate the marriage, mostly because it seemed his father was hell-bent on filling the hole his mother left in our family as quickly as possible.  In the weeks following her death, Nathan and I would visit and come away with more and more of her stuff.  His father would continually ask if we wanted this thing or that thing of hers and it just became too much.  We stopped visiting after the engagement and didn’t return until after Thanksgiving.

That first trip back was the hardest, especially since his father had succeeded in erasing all traces of Nathan’s mom from the house.  The house had been remodeled and nothing looked as it did when his mom lived there.  The kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and even the spare bedroom were all completely different. The only room that hadn’t been touched was, ironically, the master bedroom.

The first Christmas without Nathan’s mom was painful, even more so because the new wife was signing the tags on the gifts as “grandma.”  I looked at the tags in disbelief because surely someone would not be so insensitive as to assign herself the title of grandma when the family was still mourning the mother and grandma they had just lost.

That’s what really got us.  It felt as though we were being denied the opportunity to mourn.  His dad was intent on moving on as quickly as possible so that his grief wouldn’t overwhelm him and we were denied the chance to mourn with him.

After that Christmas I called up my father-in-law and told him what we thought of the tags.  He didn’t see a problem with it.  “Well what do you want us to call her,” he asked.

“We’ll call her Terrie,” I said, because that was her name.

We had a good, long talk and my father-in-law said that he felt Terrie would be a better grandma to Autumn than Nathan’s mom would have.  He didn’t elaborate on the statement, but I assumed it was because his mom’s health problems and numerous surgeries had left her so fragile.

The last time we saw Terrie was in August to celebrate the birthday of Nathan’s twin nephews.  The last time she and my father-in-law were at our house was on Autumn’s second birthday. I was never able to completely erase the resentment I felt towards her, resentment that was compounded every time I heard the twins call her “grandma.”

When Nathan called me from the hospital Wednesday night to tell me Terrie had passed, I felt an incredible amount if guilt.  I had never taken the time to get to know her.  I assumed I’d get more time to warm up to her, but nobody thought she would be gone after only two years, least of all Nathan’s dad.

The guilt has abated some as I mourn for my father-in-law.  He’s been left a widower twice in the past two and a half years.  Yesterday Nathan took off work to spend the day with him and came home with an overripe bunch of bananas.  His dad didn’t eat bananas, he said.  They were Terrie’s.

Terrie’s funeral is Sunday and I know exactly how painful this is for her family. The heart attack was unexpected, as they always are, and I’m sure none of them imagined they would be without their mother and grandmother this Christmas.

But as we do head into the holidays, I can’t help but think that our family will finally get the Christmas we should have had two years ago.  A Christmas where we deal with the loss instead of covering it up.  Instead of some of us feeling angry and betrayed, we can all feel the sadness of being left with a hole in our family yet again.

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