Memory Keeper

A personal essay by Alice Kuipers about the end of a complicated relationship with her father-in-law

One of the wonderful parts of being on Substack is getting to know other writers and watching their publications grow and evolve. We are honored to feature this guest essay by the wildly talented

Alice Kuipers

of Confessions and Coffee. - Jessica

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On Halloween, my father-in-law was rushed to the emergency room. My partner and I discussed what might be wrong. His dad couldn’t swallow, had a tightness in his chest, some pain. Not a heart attack, no. Maybe anxiety? That seemed a likely answer—several years of caring emotionally for his wife, who has Alzheimer’s, added to the stress of medical appointments, the burden of administration, the small magnified tasks.

None of our imaginings led to esophageal cancer. As my partner talked with his brother on his cell, I sought a prognosis from the ghastly fortune teller of Google: a crystal ball that became bloody. An average of eight months. Often less, depending on how far it had spread. Lethal. His parents lived on the other side of the country, thousands of miles from our prairie lives, so my partner caught a plane and I stayed home with our children.

For the next few days, as a series of intrusive tests were performed, we considered we’d get five more years. Then we hoped for two.

The story changed. We’d believed we’d lose my father-in-law within a year. We planned to visit at Christmas.

We had less than a month.

For many of the last twenty years, my father-and-law and I didn’t get along. Our complicated relationship began when I was twenty-four, and carried me through to my mid-forties. Twenty years, half my life, so while he lay dying, I became our memory keeper. Once he found out it had spread to his spine, he consulted with doctors to assist with death. I cast over the times we’d spent together, the way we’d spent the years we’d had.

The memories were sharp, brittle things.

A summer, maybe five years ago, shortly after my mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the bush outside our window was full of Carmine sour cherries. Being from Quebec, my father-in-law had never seen these before and wanted to pick them for us, a small generosity during their visit. I went outside to stand beside him under the glorious leaves and ruby jewels. It was hot, that bald heat of the prairies, in the heart of our small city, the sun beating off us and the cherry bush. He had a small metal bowl wrapped under one arm, which he plopped cherries into, his fingers stained deep red. I told him what I knew, that the cherries were developed by an agricultural team at our local university, and this species of cherry was unique to these prairies, planted by the couple who built the house we now owned.

I didn’t read his tense mood, didn’t comprehend that he was dealing with the stress of his wife, who was clearly confused and yet still so present. The guillotine of the diagnosis had fallen and his life was forever cleaved. The man wanted to pick cherries in peace. I chattered on, telling him these dwarf cherries were supremely hardy, developed by the Fruit Program at the University of Saskatchewan.

Photo by Yume Photography on Unsplash

He responded tersely, saying sharply that he couldn’t understand my accent. I’m from the UK and I can be hard to understand—my father-in-law was francophone, and while fluent in English, a translator to boot, my clipped vowels and fast delivery challenged him.

I knew all that. Yet. I was wrong footed, faintly annoyed. I wanted to soothe and smooth whatever was wrong. I made his mood about me. It wasn’t about me. On I went, pointing out that the dark maroon cherries were the ripest, the ones that fell into our hands instead of needing to be yanked free.

He tensed with irritation. I leaned further in, attempting to please. “I’m trying to help,” I said.

This only made him more flustered. “I’m the one trying to help,” he snapped, stalking away from the half-empty bowl of cherries, leaving me shaken. The rest of that trip, we remained wrongfooted. He outright snapped at me over coffee, criticized my parenting, which alit my fury. I sat, not-listening, my hands laced together tightly, teeth gritted while I endured his presence. Waiting for him to go.

My father-in-law was a poet and a novelist. He published books, won awards. He wrote in French, a language I’ve had twenty years to learn. I speak a little, go through Duolingo bursts, but life is full and French isn’t a priority. Except, it means I’ve never read his poetry. I’ve don’t know what his novels are about, other than storylines he shared with me as we tried to connect.

The pain that he suffered was so immense and distressing that he couldn’t sleep. He tried stronger drugs and was admitted to hospital. The cancer had spread to his spine and the team didn’t offer a treatment plan. Palliative support.

He signed the paperwork for MAID. The anacronym means Medically Assisted In Death. The word In was added because otherwise it spells MAD. Another word for rage.

Once everything was finished, we thought we had another week.

I’m in my mid-forties, and so I comprehend that time runs out. One of my dearest friends died of cancer in our mid-thirties, and, like most of us, I’ve lost many others, so we knew time stopped on relationships.

Until his death was scheduled for the next day. My father-in-law didn’t want me to bring the children, fearing it would distress them. And I realised that while I’d spent so many of our twenty years frustrated by, and not understanding this man, we’d never see each other again. This was a relationship that I’d never learned to value. I sifted through, searching for memories that weren’t hard to hold. Again and again, I uncovered prickly moments, misunderstandings, sharp words, irritation, cutting and drawing pinpricks of blood.

The next day, I video called him. I told him he’d been a great father to my partner, who was at the hospital. I told him we’d miss him. I choked, hardly able to speak. In all the tangled memories of my father-in-law, I’d forgotten that I loved him.

So, I told him I loved him. He told me he loved me, too.

When the MAID team arrived, I was doing school pick up. It wasn’t how we’d planned the day, but even when scheduling things like death, slips and confusions occur. I sat in our car outside our children’s school, the park beside me, the sun gazing down anticipating a prairie winter, the grass brown and sparse. My father-in-law never understood why we lived so far from family in this remote town, a place he’d never understood. I struggled to explain it to him, just as I struggled to clarify so many things.

My partner said through the phone, urgently, “It’s happening.”

I ran the audio through the vehicle.

He spoke his final words in French to the people in the room. It was as if his words were in my ear. Connected yet far away. People in the room with him sobbed and I listened, silently. The doctor pronounced him gone and my children ran toward the car. My father-in-law and I were missed moments, separated by language, age and location, yet until the doors were yanked open, my heart was full of him and everything he’d given.

A bowl of small, ruby cherries, if only I looked deeper.

Alice Kuipers

is a semi-reformed people pleaser, as well as published writer of fourteen books, taking time to pause with you in the hurly-burly on her Substack Confessions and Coffee. Read one of her latest essays on caregiving here.

About this essay, she told us, “My whole life, I've written fiction, but over the last few years I've learned that writing about my life illuminates so much for me and hopefully for readers. I learned this by ghosting for other authors at first (I have a secret life as a ghost) and slowly now I'm trusting my stories. The experience I share here lingers with me, saying something about how we connect with our families and those we love, helping me explore the messy and complicated world we live in. Losing my father-in-law was painful, shocking, and sudden. Writing about that gave me insight and a shimmer of beauty. I hope it does this for you, too.”