The timeline of my Sunday:

  • 10:00 AM – Evil mother-in-law leaves for Georgia to stay with crazy brother-in-law
  • 10:01 AM – Rejoicing begins here and continues all day
  • 9:00 PM – Mother-in-law reaches her destination
  • 11:00 PM – Mother-in-law calls to say that her mother, in a nursing home here, is dead

    • The irony of that was amazing. The mother-in-law has been at the nursing home every day for almost 2 years. Thirteen hours after she leaves town her mother dies. We bundle up and head for the nursing home. My husband’s family is weird about death. He’s never been to a funeral. They either don’t have them for his family or we aren’t invited. When his other grandmother died no one but her children were allowed to go. He has had friends who died and he didn’t go to their funerals either. He says he doesn’t want to see them dead.

    Now, in my family we have festivities. The party surrounding my grandfather’s funeral is still talked about as one wonderfully good time. He needs to come to one of those. My uncle died this summer but the husband was away on a business trip.

    We were discussing how he doesn’t want to see her when we get to the nursing home. We go to the nurses’ station and she says, “I’ll take you to see her.” I head down the hall with her and can feel him hesitate but he follows. I’m thinking that this is good for him as the nurse starts to describe her condition. This took longer than expected because her condition was apparently not dead. My mind immediately starts flipping back and forth between Princess Bride’s “He’s only mostly dead” and Monty Python’s “I’m not dead yet!”

    We go to her room and they leave us alone for privacy. For what? She looks just the same as she did last time we saw her. She hooked up to monitoring equipment that isn’t turned on. I turn it on and watch her vitals. They are normal. The husband goes out and calls his mother to inform her that her mother is not, in fact, dead.

    The nurses kept apologizing for the misunderstanding. We weren’t sure if they were apologizing for saying she was dead or apologizing for her being not dead. We decided to go home and they could call us if something else happened. It’s 9:00 AM now and there has been no call. So, I’m assuming that despite strange promises to the contrary she did not die overnight. I’m not sure what they were thinking.