My mother-in-law was 78 years old.
She became a widow when Daniel was only seven.
For more than forty years, she never remarried.
She worked whatever jobs she could find:
— Cleaning
— Laundry
— Selling food in the mornings
All to raise her son and send him to medical school.
Daniel once told me that when he was a child, there were days she ate nothing but dry bread… and still found money to buy him meat and fish.
When Daniel went to college, she still sent him envelopes with 20 or 30 dollars, carefully folded.
For herself…
She lived with a level of austerity that broke your heart.
The silent illness of old age
In recent years, my mother-in-law began showing signs of memory loss.
— Once she got lost and cried in a park until midnight.
— Once, while eating, she suddenly looked up and asked:
“Who are you?”
— Sometimes she called me by the name of her late husband’s wife.
We took her to the doctor.
The doctor said gently:
“Early-stage Alzheimer’s.”
But we never imagined she would wander the house at night.
And we never imagined that…
She would end up in her granddaughter’s bed.
When the adults finally woke up
The next morning, I showed Daniel the camera footage.
He stayed silent for a long time.
Then he broke down.
“She must remember the days when I was little…”
Daniel squeezed my hand.
“It’s my fault. I’ve been so focused on work that I forgot my mother is slowly losing herself.”
Emily slept with us the following nights.
And my mother-in-law…
We didn’t blame her.
We loved her more than ever.
