Sigh…

At this moment in time, I should be in a cushy Charleston, South Carolina hotel, perhaps just stirring to make some coffee and preparing for, oh I dunno, maybe a walk over to some famous breakfast spot we saw featured on one of Tony Bourdain’s travel/food shows, tiny camera in-hand ready to snap a few things for my photo blog.

But that’s not going to happen. MJ’s mother passed away Tuesday morning. She will be cremated, with no service of any kind. It’s weird. Definitely not what I’m used to. While the emotional ground has shifted under both his and his dad’s feet, neither one of them seems to be mourning in the traditional sense.

I’m trying to figure out how to talk about this without sounding like a cold-hearted bitch. BJ was passive-aggressive and emotionally distant. She was always civil, but never welcoming. If we went to visit them (they live only about 45 minutes from us), she started looking at her watch after about half an hour. I’m pretty sure she didn’t care for me at all, because she couldn’t bully me, and mostly, because I reminded her of her own MIL: independent, strong-willed, and only barely deferential because she’s my MIL.

I’m also pretty certain that she suffered from some form of clinical depression or another that escalated as time went on. She didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about much of anything. Except old TV game shows and QVC and HSN. She collected dolls and jewellry. She didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she wouldn’t let anyone into “her” room. She refused to see any doctor (except the dentist, for some bizzarre reason) since MJ was an infant. Doubly weird, since she was the daughter of a doctor. In the last several years, she barely ever left the house – even when “Dad” was in the hospital. So, when she fell a week ago, and was carted off by Fire/Rescue over her vehement protestations to the hospital, it should not have been too much of a surprise to discover that she had more things wrong with her than you’ve got fingers. But no one expected her to die. At least, not immediately. Six months, maybe a year. Not a week.

Both MJ and his dad (who seems to miss her in the sense of the “her” that was when they married), seem to look at this as an opportunity to clean up all of the crap she’d accumulated, reorganize (the one thing she did do was pay the bills, and that started slipping through the cracks over the last year or so), and get rid of the two-inch accumulation of dust that has settled throughout, because she wouldn’t let anyone touch anything. I’m not kidding. Think Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. You can’t put anything down on any surface without raising great clouds of fluffy dust.

So, we’re spending our days over there sorting, filing, and dusting while wearing dust masks. The company who makes Claritin is going to make a fortune on us over the next couple of weeks. Buy stock.