I was at the kitchen sink one day a few years ago as my father-in-law walked up with a few things to load into the dishwasher.
When he was done, he opened the silverware drawer, reached into his pocket, pulled out a fork and started to put it away.
“It’s clean,” he assured me. “I found it in my pocket.”
I put it in the dishwasher anyway.
My wife’s dad always had a wonderful, distinguished, absent-minded-professor way about him. But he’d recently been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and things were getting more challenging.
At the time, my in-laws were living in our basement family room so we could help take care of my mother-in-law before and after cancer surgery.
Eventually, she was ready to go back to their home in the Quad Cities. But as he got worse, we wanted them near. Maybe not in the basement — I can keep track of only so many forks — but at least in the same city.
It seemed obvious. Though they’d lived in Iowa for decades, both were from Chicago. Both children were here and the grandchildren. My parents are long dead, so these were the only grandparents my kids had ever known.
But even obvious choices are not always easy. Downsizing after nearly 40 years takes time. Eventually, though, we found a place they liked, an eight-minute drive from our house.
When they moved, the pandemic was lingering. We were still mostly working from home, allowing the flexibility to squeeze in our regular jobs around the work of preparing their condo, lining up the movers, then helping them adjust to a new place.
They loved it. It was near everything. My mother-in-law could drive to Mass, to Jewel. Friends would stop by. They enjoyed walking around their block, saying hi to new neighbors.
But my father-in-law’s decline continued. He’d ask me, day after day after day, to show him how to work on the computer he’d used for years but would never use again.
He was a fantastic poet. And he had dozens of poems on that computer. But he could no longer double-click, no longer type. Writing by hand was too difficult. A big piece of him was gone.
And then the biggest piece of him was gone, too. After a few wonderful months, my mother-in-law’s cancer returned.
We were never more grateful to have them close. My wife and her brother spent plenty of days and nights over there, managing her care. Our tiny dog — of all our pets, the only one she ever really doted on — would snuggle with her.
Unspoken goodbyes
As she grew weaker, a parade of friends and relatives visited to say hello. There were unspoken goodbyes.
Talking became difficult, so we’d watch House Hunters, one of her favorites, and I’d talk for both of us, debating the merits of each property, predicting what they’d pick. By then, I pretty much knew what she’d say.
In November 2021, just shy of her birthday, not even eight months after moving in, she died. My wife was at her side and called me soon after. It was 4 a.m. I waited to tell the kids.
After that, one of us was almost always at their condo. My in-laws’ frugality, which had bordered on obsessive, meant enough savings to pay for caregivers, including someone to stay overnight, though my wife and her brother also were there a lot.
My wife looked after her dad on Sundays, and when she was out of town, I’d go.
One Sunday, he wouldn’t get out of bed.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. He knew his mind was starting to go, he said. He knew what was ahead.
“Well,” I said, “you can tell it’s happening, so that means it hasn’t happened yet. And I brought breakfast from McDonald’s.”
“OK,” he said, and we headed for the kitchen.
Over time, it got harder to move around, to go out. He started seeing things, started shuffling papers, packing up a briefcase that wasn’t there to go to an office he didn’t work at anymore.
A Christmas baby, he saw just one more birthday after his wife died, and seven months after she was gone, so was he.
Nancy and John McBride had similar funerals, in the same church, and are buried next to each other in Des Plaines — as it happens, about four miles from where I lived as a boy. My wife has a plot there, too, as do I, purchased by her family long before they knew whom she’d marry.
I’m more of a cremate-me-and-scatter-my-ashes kind of guy, but I definitely want part of me there, with them, too.
John O’Neill is deputy politics and government editor. He has worked at the Sun-Times since 2012, after 19 years as a reporter, editor and columnist at The Indianapolis Star. He is married to Suzanne McBride, a Sun-Times assistant metro editor.
This column is part of an occasional series introducing readers to editors and others “behind the scenes” at the Sun-Times.
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