Joan’s Funeral

My mother-in-law lived with us for 5 years full-time and for 15 years before that half-time, from the time her husband died. She was an alcoholic from the moment I met her (when she was just about to be sixty) – which by the way was how old I was when my own crazy mother died. Obviously I have a mother karma thing….but more about that in another story.

Joan was a pretty and bright lady – born in Newfoundland but educated in Nova Scotia. She wanted nothing more than to be correct in society’s standing. She loved her husband very much and was willing to stay in the little box society made for her. She had been trained as a concert pianist, but before having children her husband had told her to quit taking lessons at the Peabody (because he was worried that her professor was hitting on her). Instead she took to drinking too much, I imagine. It was very much the done thing in her social circles.

They had trouble having a baby and by the time Lew came along he was the apple of both parents’ eyes.  I think Lew’s dad was actually a bit jealous of Lew though, by the time I met him. Perhaps about his son’s physical strength and youth (ha and maybe even about his gorgeous wife for all I know). Lew’s dad had bad rheumatoid arthritis all his life, he had been a mathematician and had made good money with IBM – even helping on the team that wrote the early computer language of Fortran. But Joan became an alcoholic over those years.

Fast forward to Christmas 2010 and daughter Sadie’s husband is visiting us from University – Mom, Dad and Grandma living in Paris. Sadie and Son Terry are there too of course. He is trying to heal from his first bout of schizophrenia, taking a year off school, and Grandma Joan is smoking in her back bedroom – and sending Terry out to buy wine even though his medicine is strictly counter indicated for alcohol.

We five younger people went to Strasbourg (leaving Joan with her visiting nephew John, because she could never be left alone for even one night. She would drink herself under the table, literally, and break an arm). We drove through the last really snowy day I have every seen in Paris for our Christmas holiday and son-in-law Jacob even encouraged us to stop by my old family homestead (that my great grandfather had vacated when his town became German). Back home again, Grandma Joan played the piano from her wheelchair while the rest of us sang along our favorite christmas carols. I took this as a perfect example of families taking care of each other. It was pretty good. But it turned out that Jacob could not go with daughter Sadie to England as they had planned.

We thought of a plan for Sadie and Jacob to go rent an apartment in Kenya and Grandma Joan could go back later and live with them, next year – after Sadie finished her music technology degree. They would  go there together and the three of them could take on the Kenyan music industry by storm. Or at least Grandma could pay the rent and the young newly weds could build a studio and hip-hop brand.

Terry would finish his degree too. He went back to St. Andrew’s and somehow got through (that is another story for another time that Grandma Joan didn’t take part in). Lew and I would stay in Paris.

But within that next year things fell apart. By this time Joan had nurses come bathe her every other day in our Haussmannien apartment, but they only spoke French so I supervised. Lew had a work trip to Turkey in March. I went with him just for a holiday. We were having a good time in Bodrum, until Grandma got too sick – being left alone with only Terry panicked her I presume – and she got pneumonia.

We rushed home and called emergency services who took her to the hospital. The French medical services said that she couldn’t go back home with us and that she needed more care than I could give her. I did have a job too at the time, I was adjunct faculty at a business school in Paris. Joan was fine with the nice first place we took her too for the first month after hospital, because she thought it was temporary. But after a month and 5000 euros cost, we decided that she needed to go to a cheaper place to stay permanently.

The second nursing home wasn’t as nice though it looked fine to us despite the shortage of English-speaking staff. It was in a less posh suburb and our fatal flaw was that Lew was out of town when Terry and I took Grandma across town in an ambulance/moving truck to her new home. She had always deeply trusted Lew and his father before him. But perhaps she only really trusted him, I’m afraid. So Terry and me taking her to her cheaper place wasn’t good enough. She hated this new place. And they put her in diapers at night too. We visited her often, pretty much every day, but she was really unhappy and becoming bitter. She wasn’t allowed to smoke and was only allowed wine with lunch (where she sat with some other English speakers).

So, we decided to ‘spring her’ from this particular prison. We flew her to Kenya to live with Jacob until Sadie was done with her degree and they could happily live every after. The 9-hour flight nearly killed her of course, but she loved the Kenyan staff and the balcony with a view over nature. She smoked, drank, and socialized in English to her heart’s content.

But she only lasted a few months there after all. Lew had told the really good hospital who could take care of her perfectly, that she didn’t want any more blood donations….she had some kind of an anemia that we could not heal – we could just mask it with blood transfusions. After a few months we all decided not to mask it anymore. In Kenya particularly, regular blood transfusions felt too vampire like.

Lew and I were together on another business trip in Barcelona when he got a call from Kenya and had to hold firm with the hospital that he only wanted hospice care for his mother. It must have been very hard on him, I remember him having to shout at staff in Nairobi.

He flew immediately to Nairobi though and went straight to the hospital.

I guess he went to see her and was told that she was in a “light coma”. So he sat with her. He held her hand and talked to her…she clearly knew he was there, she squeezed his hand a few times. Then he said good night and headed home to sleep. But he was called back before he even got the taxi heading in the right direction. He turned right around and got to her room in time to see her corpse still in its death throws. The nurses kicked him out of the room for a few minutes then he was allowed back in to see her all cleaned up and peaceful.

We all trusted and knew that she had moved to a better place. Her time had come (such is life: none of us are getting out of here alive) and it was good that the hospital didn’t keep her on life support, and in limbo, forever. We are born alone and we die alone.

Then poor Lew had to take care of funeral arrangements.

Luckily his parents had paid some American trust to cover the costs of cremation in advance. Unluckily Kenyans don’t like cremation.

The next day Lew had to go into Nairobi Morgue and file death certificates and such. He also had to buy a coffin because the funeral parlor would not do business with him without a coffin.

Jacob was there insisting that Grandma be cremated according to the Hindu faith (in which he was educated). According to Hindus, of whom there are plenty in Nairobi, the spirit leaves the body in the smoke and the warmth of the funeral pyre. But according to the funeral parlor they were working with, the body is sent into the hot ovens in its coffin to be burnt like that. Jacob would have none of it. He wanted to sit near the fire as she burnt and feel the warm of her spirit as she moved on. So the parlor took her out of her coffin and sent her into the brief hot flames. Jacob was very disappointed that her small body hardly made any smoke come out of the chimney. But there were some grievers to bear witness all the same. Lew was then left with a coffin that he didn’t need – he donated it to a family of mourners who were there at the time and who couldn’t afford to pay for one (We were saving a tree I guess).

Next the funeral parlor was going to just throw out her ashes, but Lew demanded that they be saved in an urn, and given to him. His parents had wanted to be together in their urns and we had his father’s ashes on our bookshelf (a fitting place for an avid reader). The funeral parlor had no urns to choose from – but Lew demanded something – so they brought something. In a bizarrely humorous twist of fate, the ‘urn’ they could provide was a Japanese lunch basket, made of light plastic. Lew had mentioned some loving quote so this one had two tiny penguins on it saying ‘love forever’. It certainly didn’t match Lew’s father’s urn which was heavy and black and made to look like an ancient Grecian vase. But it did travel easily back to France with him where we had another memorial service for our grandma Joan.

None of our kids could join us – but we will always remember our last Christmas together to remember Musical fun-loving grandma by. “We will always have Paris”

I also remember that Lew told me by phone right after his mother died in Kenya. I called my oldest sister at her home in Seattle, to tell her the news. While I was on the phone to Anamaria (international calls were still expensive at that time) I heard a terrible crash from my bedroom. I hung up to go see what it was all about and found that Grandma Joan’s mirror had jumped off the wall. To be scientifically fare here – this apartment was above several very active train lines along Blvd. Magenta, and we always felt small earthquakes going on. Still the timing was eerie and when I called Anamaria back, I said that if anything else jumped off the wall I was checking into a hotel that night. But nothing did and I cleaned up the broken glass the next morning.

The last phase of this story involves the dispersal of Grandma’s ashes, along with those of her husband. We decided that one of their favorite places on earth was on Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia where they had honeymooned so many years before, and we would spread there ashes there. So we just packed their urns in our suitcases. We flew to Boston where we met Terry and then drove to Nova Scotia. Had we known that this is considered highly illegal we may have thought twice about it – but we did not. Joan’s third ceremony was held on the beach near her nephew’s home with a handful of mourners present. Her son and her grandson each poured out one urn just at sunset and we toasted her life.