Late last year, my wife’s father, the evil incarnate, slipped or tripped and fell. He fractured part of his hip, but in a place that should have healed by itself. Therefore, he was confined to the apartment and was doing okay hobbling back and forth from his room to the bathroom and kitchen.
I call him “evil incarnate” for a reason. He is quite the character. A few snippets of his life: before the war when he was 17, he had a child with someone that evidentially he was never married to. Seventy years later, his wife and my wife found out about it. During the war, he sent a letter to his first wife saying that he had been killed. Later he coincidentally run into her after the war and discovered he had another child. His whole life, he was an actor and “played more than 200 roles”. His biggest act, I think, was when he is in his role as a human. When he married my mother in law, she already had 2 daughters from her previous marriage. My wife came along when he was 60 years old. In a 2 room apartment, he insisted on having his own room. His wife and daughters shared the other room until the daughters married off. He would bring home dogs to my wife when she was a kid. As soon as he got tired of them, he would “give them away to a friend”. And these are just snippets.
Each year since we moved back to the States, my mother-in-law comes to visit us on her vacation time. She stays for a month and gets to rest. Every year, my father-in-law throws a fit when she leaves. This year was no exception. She, amazingly enough, talked her sister into stopping in every day to check up on him, make him food, clean, whatever. When she left, he decided that he wasn’t going to walk anymore. And once that dagger was in, he started twisting it, behaving extremely poorly. I won’t go into details.
When my mother-in-law came back, they realized that she was not going to be able to care for him, work, and stay sane so she picked the better two. They found a hospice and took him there. She visits often. His behavior there is lacking as well. This week, they did some blood work on him and found that he has cancer. Probably advanced stages. For an old man who has been selfish, manipulative, and deceitful his whole life, death must be a frightening prospect. We are trying to get my wife over there to visit this year. I wonder if she will make it.
