“She was a lovely lady.”

Yesterday we received the call that we had been anticipating for days, weeks even months. My wonderful mother-in-law was called to her eternal home. While it came as no surprise, it still is a shock as our lives were so intwined. Many of our life choices were decided with her in mind. We were her only family and we loved her.

In thinking about her, her life and our relationship, I think the words that others have described her in sending us their condolences, truly captures who she was: she was a lovely lady.

She wasn’t born to any grand estate but she was raised with a certain decorum and expectation of how one behaved. Manners were key. The true meaning of manners-of kindness, thoughtfulness and putting others before you.

She had seen hardship and disappointment in her life yet I never heard her complain or moan about it. As a child of the Depression, her father lost his job and she lived with her grandparents away from her parents as her father trained for another career. She was shuttled around and attended different schools. It was only in her dementia state that we learned that she always felt like the group outsider: with her declining faculties and executive function, she would be “wounded” when she thought the other residents on her floor didn’t say hello or speak to her. Or she would accuse them of laughing at her. She couldn’t comprehend that those other residents didn’t mean what they said or did. They too were experiencing a decline in their health. We just had to murmur reassurances to her. At one point, she had gotten herself worked up, “I don’t even think that that are Christians!”

But generally, she felt very blessed. She married the love of her life. They had 67 “fairy tale” (her description) years together. She had the son she wanted. (“We had difficulty with pregnancies,” she once told me. “When I finally became pregnant, I prayed that I would have a boy and that he would look just like his father. While he looks more like my father, his personality is just like his dad’s.”) She thoroughly enjoyed her two grandsons and loved the antics of the family dogs.

She was a loyal friend. A wonderful listener. A true confidant. Her friends used to say that she would’ve been a great CIA agent. If you told her something in confidence, she would not repeat it to anyone.

From the first time I met her I was impressed that she never appeared harried. Never rushed. She was meticulous with everything she did. She knew how to pace herself. One time I offered to help her and my father-in-law paint one of their bedrooms. I got to their house anticipating that this would be a long day of getting the room completed, top to bottom, since my project philosophy is to just keep at it until finished whether I am exhausted or not. (I might add that this philosophy is not recommended when living and interacting with other people.) It turned out that they were just painting the trim of the room. Not the ceiling. Not the walls. Not the windows. The job was done in about an hour. When finished I said, “What next?” “Oh, that was it,” she replied. “Want to stay for lunch?”

I was always amazed at her generosity with us. She was an only child. My husband is an only child. She never thought she would have grandchildren. She was never controlling, manipulative or demanding. They lived around the corner from us and we saw each other frequently but they never interfered. We could drop by anytime and they would welcome us with open arms.

She was lovely. The embodiment of love. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

My prayer is that I can be the kind of mother-in-law she was to me.

She was a lovely lady.