Requiem

I haven't written any blog posts for nearly eight years. 

 After moving across the river to another state, and not having to see FIL or the Twins anymore, life became much more pleasant. After DH and I returned from our mission in South America, we established a life and new neighbors. Spent time with our exceptional children and grandchildren. Grew a nice but smaller garden. Went traveling, attended the temple, served in church callings. 

 We only lived in our new home for a little over three years when DH began having strange symptoms, including fainting twice, once at a friend's house and once in the mountains on a three-day hike with his sons. He thought he was recovering from the flu. I noticed that he was becoming very pale. He had an appointment to see our son-in-law the doctor, but one Monday morning about 4:00 a.m. he woke me up and said he needed to go to the emergency room. It was there that he was diagnosed with a terminal form of Acute Myeloid Leukemia with a FLT-3 blood marker; the beginning of a long nightmare. 

I turned on the GPS and followed the ambulance to downtown Boise, where we spent most of the rest of DH's life--over 8-1/2 months--getting chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant with his youngest sister as donor, and 100-day recovery that did not go well. We stayed for six weeks in a basement condo near the hospital, and then another six weeks trading off between our two sons that lived 20 minutes from the hospital. I was constantly exhausted. He did look better and for a few weeks helped my oldest daughter build a shed, although he was unable to finish it; our youngest son flew in and helped finish the job.

 After a very trying infection and another third dose of chemotherapy, DH was sent home with nothing more they could do. It was six weeks in hospice. The first three weeks we spent with children and grandchildren saying goodbye; a steady stream of neighbors and friends from all parts of his life saying goodbye; reconciling with the Twins, and mostly sleeping, sitting on the couch, or eating whatever he wanted, now. The last three weeks he was down in the hospital bed, becoming more and more detached from life. He talked constantly to people on the other side. I wrote some of it down but I can't read it, still. It hurts too much. 

I slept on the couch nearby. I had Cheerful SIL with me, and the hospice nurses, thank heaven, and for those last three weeks of caring for him, turning him, dosing him with morphine and anti-anxiety drugs, cleaning him, my son who had helped his own father-in-law at the end, was also there. Thank God. I think my other children couldn't bear seeing their father this way. I was an emotional and physical wreck at the end of it. 

My darling husband died on a Friday morning in mid-July. My son called me into the room. I put my hand on his slowing heartbeat (how I loved feeling his heart beating in his warm chest) and felt it finally stop, felt him growing cold. He was a husk by now. I closed his eyes shut. The hospice nurse and the mortician came and collected him in a protective wrapper, loading him into the back of an unmarked van. My son and I went to the funeral home and chose a casket, made plans for the funeral. He took me home with him for the weekend, to where there was warmth and music and grandchildren. My daughter-in-law took me to wander aimlessly in a nearby plant nursery. It was just what I needed. 

I was in shock that lasted for a long time. I made it through the funeral a week later. The son who spent time with me during hospice asked to speak. He told some of the relatives that they needed to forgive and let go. My husband made sure he was right with his relations, the bishop, the stake president, and God before he left this earth. 

 Then I slept a lot. I wandered around lost. I had to deal with the innumerable details of the end of someone's life. I had to change all my accounts and deal with my husband's estate. I had already been through this sort of thing several times, fortunately, so it all got done eventually. The sun still shone during the day and went down at night. Life went on. 

 I became aware that I was a physical and emotional wreck. I started walking again and cleaning myself up. Working in my garden and listening to music was therapy. I began involving myself in other people's lives. I went to church. I was asked to do things. I wasn't emotionally stable, but I needed to not be alone. I went to one son's home for Christmas and another son took me on a family vacation with him. My daughter visited me often. I made plans to go on a cruise with two of my sisters, their husbands, and my second daughter. 

 At the end of December, on my oldest son's birthday, my father-in-law finally died. He was 94 years old. Sister Caretaker wanted to cremate him because she was worn out and didn't want to deal with it anymore, but Sister Twin came and put him in his home-made coffin in the back of a pickup, drove him to Salt Lake City cemetery, and had him buried with my mother-in-law. 

Then there was the wrangling and drawn out nonsense of his estate settlement. Cheerful SIL was now the sole trustee since DH had been the other co-trustee. She patiently went through all of it with a lot of input from me, since I knew what and where everything was, and no one else did. It took forever, because the estate attorney had made so many idiot mistakes, mistakes which had plagued us since MIL's passing 13 years before. And Sister Twin wouldn't sign the documents she was asked to, or cash the final checks from the estate, because she was traumatized, as usual. 

I didn't care anymore, as happens with these things that you once cared about so passionately. So we waited, and she finally relented and signed, and it was me that ended up with the entire farm, all by myself. Sole owner. I Was The Farm. Poetic justice. I sold it to the renters. It is a nice tidy income for twenty years. We will spend a lot of that on travel and helping grandchildren with college and missions. 

Our renters put our former, beloved Mexican hired man and his family in our farmhouse they also bought from us. The money that would have come to DH after his father's death now was split five ways for my children, which I was glad of, since I didn't need it, and they did. And I owed no capital gains tax on any of it. I would still rather have my husband. The irony of it all was that the planned memorial for FIL had to be postponed for over a year because the Covid pandemic hit. I was frankly glad. I didn't want to have to appear to mourn him. 

I remember once talking to a friend whose father was the same generation as FIL, both, in fact, WWII-era farmers, strong willed and antagonistic to each other on principle. They ruled their respective families with the same sort of self-aggrandizing, entitled iron fist. Although FIL was ultimately incompetent, something I came to appreciate since he was unable to understand his wife's machinations to preserve their properties and lives. If he had known better, he could have made a much bigger mess of things. And his desire to keep from giving anything away as he had promised to his grandson who wanted to farm, preserved everything altogether so that it all came, intact, to me. 

 So when I asked my friend how he felt about his grandfather being gone, he said, it's not better, it's different. I thought about that a long time. It finally came down to the fact that I was only sorry FIL hadn't died a long time ago, perhaps freeing MIL to live a longer and fuller and happier life without him. His death set his children free. We are at an age that we have children and grandchildren, and our lives turn away from the home we grew up in to our place at the head of our own family line. We are responsible whether we like it or not. 

Our renter/buyer told Brother Twin living up on the hill on the farm that if he and his wife wanted to stay there, they could, but that none of their children or grandchildren could continue to. I really believe Brother Twin wanted all his children cleared out, but was too weak to tell them to go. Weak in the same way his father was. Weak willed, self-indulgent, childish, angry, blaming, dependent on my husband to provide leadership, management, reputation, and family fortune. There was no one he could blame any longer. 

Our renter/buyer was on good terms with him, so he was able to use this as a shield to send his children away. They have now all bought or rented their own homes. As easy as that. A few years after this, gophers ate through the buried electrical box and put an end to electricity to Brother Twin's trailer. So he now lives with his oldest daughter in town. She lives in a mess similar to the one she grew up in. But she seems to have taken over the role of matriarch. Several other members of the family--divorced sister, nephew, son, and now father--live with her there, since Brother Twin's wife still lives somewhere else. 

In the last weeks of DH's life, strangely and without asking, I knew I would marry again. For a long while, he would hang around in spirit and make sure I was ok. He was always like that, very solicitous of me. I could tell he was inside me because I would start to cry and say "I love you I love you" over and over again. Then I told Father in Heaven if I was going to have to marry again, he better show up soon because I was getting used to living alone, and I could do it, too. I didn't mind being alone (too much) and I had resources and family nearby. I knew it was coming soon, though, because DH stopped coming around, and he finally gave me a tender goodbye. Although I still see him in my dreams, and I can tell he when is nearby.  It doesn't hurt quite so much, and I have allowed myself to be happy again.

We can be happy in relation to how much we have suffered.

I seem to have a gift of having friends and family members say goodbye to me, within 48 hours after their death. I don't see them exactly, but I know where they are, what their state of mind is, and I hear in my mind their communication with me. My paternal grandmother, my mother, an older sister, my husband, a younger sister. The friend whose husband I later married. And my father-in-law. I was sitting downstairs in my grandmother's chair. He appeared to my left, about 3 feet above the floor. He was swirling in a sort of dark embarrassment. Mostly I have seen excitement, great love and happiness, or even wistfulness, in the case of my sister. But my father-in-law wasn't there by choice. He was asking forgiveness. I told him I loved him, and to go with God and not worry. He immediately cleared into white light, and went up. It was a tender mercy. 

 As for my friend who died a year after my husband did, I was climbing the stairs when I saw her sitting downstairs holding onto the sides of the chair as she usually did. I said hello and asked if there was something I could do for her. She asked if I would take care of her children. I said I would do whatever God required of me. And then she was gone.

My second husband was my DH's friend at whose house he fainted. They were golfing buddies and did carpentry projects together. He came to my house to finish something DH had asked him to do, and I knew that he would be the one I would marry. It was only nine months widowhood for him and 21 months for me, the same as my mother when she remarried. I wasn't sure about the whole thing but it all came about inevitably. I took a birthday card to a friend of mine and he was there for dinner and gospel discussion. So we kept coming together until he made it official. He is almost ten years older than I am but physically in better shape. Our families love and respect each other. We went on a year-long mission to New Zealand together, during which time Cheerful Trustee SIL kept sending me letters to sign and send back to the U.S. post haste in order to get her father's estate finally settled. 

 Before we married, Cheerful SIL asked if we could have the long-postponed memorial service for FIL a few days before our wedding, since everyone would be in town. I couldn't believe they were even considering it, but Cheerful SIL is nothing if not persistent and enduring. I was hoping it would not happen. But it was mostly a family affair with a scattering of old friends, held in the gazebo behind the stake center. I brought my fiancé along. Brother Twin's family had good feelings toward him because he had built a house for one of the sons who ended up having eleven children that couldn't fit into their double wide trailer. We had refreshments and took pictures, and then I really didn't have the heart to have many of them in my life anymore, although I dearly love those who are real sisters to me. 

 My new husband has now lived in this house almost as long as my Dear Husband did. He is kind, accommodating, and wants me to be happy. We are both quiet and faithful family centered church members. He has many things in common with DH, which makes life sweet. Our families get on famously. His siblings are supportive and have such little drama in their lives, it has been healing to know them. I am thankful and I am blessed. 

 I am hopeful, after having seen my father in law in a vision, that he has made things right with his ever suffering wife and his magnificent son, in heaven. I can only love him for providing such a son to be mine forever.

Post Script: I have long wondered and thought about what would have happened if my Dear Husband had realized his father’s and his family’s pathologies earlier in life , rather than continue on as he did. The “Golden Child,” as his siblings called him, unbeknownst to him, two of them enviously, the rest of them with admiration and thankfulness. He was treated differently by his parents because they knew at some subterranean level he would redeem and deliver their family. He was driving tractor at age eight. He was the head of the family at age 21, when he came home from his mission, according to his sisters. His father allowed it because DH never sought for credit, repelled, as we all were, at FIL’s insistence that he be given credit it for everything. It was all distorted and dishonest, but to DH it was normal life, and he fell back into it, until his mother died and he couldn’t make excuses for his father’s behavior anymore. 

At first we thought it was Borderline Sister Twin or Passive Aggressive Brother Twin, but they were simply acting out the family pathologies for everyone to see. It was only when my own stepfather, a juvenile psychiatrist, came to visit with my mother, that he was able to explain what was happening to us. He taught us how to defend ourselves and how to set boundaries. We came up with the Narcissist diagnosis by ourselves, for FIL. 

When it became clear that the elephant in the room DH joked about for years, was simply another name for Mendacity, for Secrets, for Papering Over the Truth by being Forgiving and Kind (a specialty of my MIL), we communicated with the sane sisters and began telling the truth. Revelation dawned and there was animated sending of emails clearing up our understanding of what had been confusion and perplexity and the strong desire to escape. The oldest sister, who had been hostage to Sister Twin all this time and regarded DH as an ogre of the basest kind, now saw the light, something that extended to the revelation that her adopted son was a sociopath, not a happy realization but a truthful one. We cannot heal if we cannot diagnose. Sister Twin realized that she was “losing grace” with the eldest, and after DH told her that she would not be allowed to continue her pitting one family member against the other, she felt she had been cast out. She still suffers from her hurts, but at least the sane sisters do not try to couch facts into soothing lies to spare her feelings. I feel sympathy for her and believe she does her best. Perhaps one day her mind will be cleared and sane and whole. 

When we began telling the truth, it changed the dynamics of our relationship with FIL, as I knew it would and prepared for. He wouldn’t countenance it and punished us up until he died. 

I had asked DH early on why he and MIL manipulated FIL the way they did; he said it was necessary and for everyone’s good. Perhaps; I always thought it was living a lie, but it was not my father and not my family business. I lived with it , tried to understand the cognitive dissonance and be forgiving and kind. We separated our family from the commotion as much as we could. I think I was a comfort to my MIL because we could discuss things intellectually, which she loved. DH helped her engineer (if that is a better word than manipulate) FIL to live his best life, even if it was so often at everyone else’s expense. The continued manipulation caused distortions and permitted the pathologies to become soul-destroying and carry over into the next generation. 

If we had told the truth up front, we would have been cast out, and there would be no farm. It wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years, if that. In the end, however, God gave it all back to us. We were willing to walk out and go on a mission even if there was nothing left when we returned home. Our nephew left, Grandpa spent half the time away from the farm, and our renter/buyer turned it into an even greener garden spot. 

And I AM the Farm, the dowager, the rich widow,  reading over this and wondering how it could possibly have all happened, and how I am learning to be happy again, perhaps because of what we were called upon to suffer.

A Fading World

It's been over a year since I posted. In that time, Caretaker SIL took FIL to her house to care for him over the winter. They returned in the spring, but it was evident that FIL has been increasingly losing ground. The medications did well away from the ancestral home, but when they returned to the farm, FIL began to be more agitated, to the point that his medication levels have been doubled. He has been reading Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven repeatedly and exclusively. He wonders if the children are safe. He doesn't recognize his own grandchildren and sometimes his own children. He now uses a walker, which he resolutely refused at first. He doesn't want to travel anywhere anymore, to favorite spots, to visit family, to church, anywhere. He asks after his 94-year-old girlfriend, who died earlier this year after refusing to eat any longer.

Caretaker SIL now treats him like a one-year-old child. His communications are fragmented, bizarre, and confused. She has said this is their last summer here. After this, they will remain at her home, where she has access to closer medical facilities for veterans, and he is more calm than when he is in the house he built for his family.

Since we are no longer living nearby, Caretaker SIL was finding her life isolated--she could not leave FIL even for a short time. She would hire nearby great-grandsons to grandpa-sit so she could go to the grocery store. Eventually another, cheerful SIL, who with her husband had been living in Hawaii, came back and are living with Caretaker SIL while Cheerful SIL's husband takes care of his aging parents not far away. They will live in the farmhouse until they find a place for his parents to stay, and find and buy a home of their own. We are thankful for them. They share the burden of grandpa-sitting, and are a welcome, happy, adult-conversation addition to an otherwise grim and infantile farmhouse.

FIL's last and only activity is gardening. He did not plant the garden in the large back yard--the Mexican hired men did. He thinks it is his. He goes out and hoes and comes back in, exhausted for a couple of days. But it is all he has left of a life that no longer makes sense to him.

When the green tomatoes started coming on, he started picking them without allowing them to ripen. Buckets and buckets of tomatoes. He put them on the floor to ripen, as he did in years past when the green tomatoes were picked at the end of the season so they could ripen inside when the weather got too cold. Eventually he realized somehow that they were not ripening, and spread them all outside on the side of the gravel driveway, in the sun. A few are getting mushy orange.

Then he got the idea that he needed to plant tomatoes in July. So he hoed a row and set water in it, and planted the green tomatoes in it.

He picked so many buckets of green tomatoes that finally Caretaker SIL will not let him back in the garden, at all, so that the tomatoes can ripen for the ones who planted them. It is a sad end to one of the only things he has been good at, in his life.

Caretaker SIL has needed breaks from him, since she oversees every aspect of his life, and he is wearying to care for. She came to our house for five days (when he first began picking buckets of green tomatoes under the care of Cheerful SIL's husband), and she has been gone for a week at the youngest sister's house, resting up before her father's last journey to her home. She had been talking to my husband about the possible need for him to be placed in memory care, especially when he can no longer go to the bathroom by himself. We were looking at memory care facilities in our area and were planning on making applications for the eventuality. But then she dropped the idea, and started talking about arrangements for cremating him when he dies.

Caretaker SIL's daughter took care of my MIL, my husband's mother, when she was dying of cancer. This granddaughter is a worker in geriatric care, and knows the signs of losing grip on life.

The hospice guide she uses is http://www.dignitycare.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/When-Death-is-Near.pdf  Although he is physically strong, stroke has felled several of his otherwise-healthy siblings. I believe small strokes have affected him over the last several years. He speaks of "going home," which might mean going back to Caretaker SIL's home, although he lives on the farm more than half the year, and has lived there over 60 years. The hospice guide says that this may be symbolic language, of going home, not anywhere on earth.

Cheerful SIL, after observing the care her sister takes of her father, thinks she should be paid a million dollars after he dies. I do too.

Meds for FIL

D.H. went to visit Sister Caretaker, always looking for a way to make life easier for her. She has been continuing to care for the beautiful yard at our old house, something she loves to do. It has not yet been rented. The wonderful couple who bought it from us do not seem to be in a hurry to rent it out. I think they are looking for exactly the right family.

D.H. said his father was out in the garden. FIL looked up and saw D.H., waved, came over and greeted him. FIL seemed surprised that our car had a license plate from a different state, and asked if we had moved. He was friendly and courteous. D.H. was so surprised that he asked Sister Caretaker about it. She said the depression and anxiety meds were finally kicking in, and it has made a wonderful difference in him. Her life is much better with him being so much more relaxed, although she is now unable to leave him at all since he has continual problems with continence, a side effect of the meds.

We saw them both at a wedding reception last night. As he had done before, FIL saw us, got up, shook our hands, and greeted us cordially. I can only say I am glad for the better outlook on life. It is hard to think of a loved one so bitter, tense, and unhappy, and such a relief when they are able to let it all go, whether with meds or not.

Depression and anxiety, evidently, are not uncommon among the elderly:  "Associated cognitive aspects of underlying anxiety disorders include hypervigilance to threat, seeing oneself as vulnerable, and perceiving the demands of life as exceeding the available resources to cope.[5] Older adults are at risk for anxiety disorders.[5] Increasing frailty, medical illness, and losses can contribute to feelings of vulnerability and fear, and can reactivate anxiety disorders." "The Silent Geriatric Giant: Anxiety Disorders in Late Life" http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/579825

Sister Caretaker says it is all good. She has re-read The Narcissistic Family , which reassures her that the coping mechanisms used by FIL's children has affected their lives, for good or ill, and that recognizing what has happened is vital in being able to forgive and understand.

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

I have been reading Why Does He DO That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft, one of the world's foremost experts on domestic abuse, who worked 15 years with abusive men who run afoul of the legal system. I recommend it highly.

The one mention of narcissism, on p. 103, explains that the difference between any abusive man and a narcissist who abuses is a) an abusive man usually reserves his abuse for his partner while a narcissist's abuse carries over into situations that don't involve the partner; b) he (the narcissist) seems to relate everything back to himself; and c) he is outraged whenever anyone criticizes him and is incapable of considering that he could every be anything other than kind and generous. "This disorder is highly resistant to therapy and is not treatable with medication."

Lundy does point out that when pressed, abusive men will admit that their behaviors are abusive. You can't get that admission from a narcissist.

"This condition is highly compatible with abusiveness, though it is present in only a small percentage of abusive men," perhaps because narcissism is diagnosed in a very small number of people in the first place. Lundy's assertion that this condition is highly compatible with abusiveness bears out the  view that narcissists are abusers by another name, whether they realize what they are doing or not.

Lundy absolutely nails the behaviors, and gives insights into what works and what doesn't when dealing with the behaviors, and why.

He explains abuse this way: The term abuse is about power; it means that a person is taking advantage of a power imbalance to exploit or control someone else. The defining point of abuse is when the man starts to exercise power over the woman in a way that causes harm to her and creates a privileged status for him.

I was especially interested in the Why? of Why Does He DO That? 
On p. 152, Lundy describes the privileges of being an abuser:

1. The intrinsic satisfaction of power and control—a sensation that can create a potent, thrilling rush.
2. Getting his way, especially when it matters most. He rarely has to compromise, gets to do the things he enjoys, and skips the rest. He ends up with the benefits of being in an intimate relationship without the sacrifices that normally come with the territory.
3. Someone to take his problems out on.
4. Free labor from her; leisure and freedom for him. No abusive man does his share of the work in a relationship. On a deeper level the abuser seems to realize how hard his partner works, because he fights like hell not to have to share that burden.
5. Being the center of attention, with priority given to his needs.
6. Financial control.
7. Ensuring that his career, education, or other goals are prioritized
8. Public status of partner and/or father without the sacrifices
9. The approval of his friends and relatives
10. Double standards. An abusive man subtly or overtly imposes a system in which he is exempt from the rules and standards that he applies to you.

"Is it any wonder that abusive men are reluctant to change? If we want abusers to change, we will have to require them to give up the luxury of exploitation."

No Excuses Anymore

It has been 10 months since I posted about Sister Caretaker keeping Brother Twin away from FIL. Since that time, even when she took him away to live on the other side of the state for six months and there was no contact with us, he continued to feed his own agitated and endless rantings against DH (Dear Husband) that he has always been prone to, without provocation, to the extent that he spent sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden days because of it.

S.C. reports that FIL had been threatening to send my dear husband to jail for stealing from him, in order to provide me, his spendthrift wife, with the rich life to which I was accustomed before I married D.H. over 40 years ago. (My parents would both laugh at that.) He accosted the neighbor who leases our farm ground and told him he wants to see his own signature on the lease agreement. (The agreement wasn't with him.) D.H. informed the neighbor that FIL should talk instead to D.H. about it. FIL has not brought the subject up again.

I have long thought FIL had at least a series of strokes causing vascular dementia and diminishing cognition, if not old age dementia or Alzheimer's. The paranoia about others stealing from him is a common behavior of those with dementia. We once discussed having him evaluated to consider having him declared mentally incompetent, so he could not be taken advantage of by anyone, for example, asking for money. This would have meant a legal process. Just having him take the usual battery of tests would most likely reveal profound enough problems that any exploitation of him could be brought into question. Sister Caretaker set up an appointment for him when he returned home. Sister Twin was invited as well.

In taking the famous psychometric and cognitive clock-drawing screening test, he drew a clock with two numbers on one side and ten on the other. This was in addition to the oral questions and answers, which, S.C. reports, demonstrate beyond doubt that he is profoundly incompetent. S.C. now estimates his real age to be that of a three-year-old. She asked for, and they prescribed, both depression and anxiety medication for him. She has begun administering it, but it will take several weeks to see what effect it will have.

In the meantime, S.C. is finally refusing to listen to his non-stop ranting. For several years she would simply insert her earbuds and listen to music, watch a movie, or read a book while he shouted and paced in fury, his hands balled into fists of rage. But allowing it to go on unchecked has not helped, and may have added to his inability to control his emotions. Now she tells him whenever he starts that she will simply not listen to him berate her brother. He must stop. And in many instances, he does stop.

FIL turns 90

I have read blog posts by those with aged narcissistic parents, and it appears that difficult behaviors, if anything, become more rigid as the years go by. It may be that those who have compensated for and been a mitigating factor in their lives are now gone. Or, as my MIL used to say, someone who is a mean old man was once a mean young man. And a nice old man was once a nice young man. We truly become ourselves as we get older.

When we landed in the U.S., we stayed for a week with one daughter's family, then drove across the state to visit our other children. At the time we were invited to visited my husband's sister's family, who lives in the same state. But FIL was staying with them, so we declined the invitation.

We stayed with another daughter for several months while we found a new, smaller house to live in (in another state) but while we were there, we were called by one of the twins to Skype with FIL. He was staying with her for a few weeks since the Sister caretaker was having a medical emergency. We knew what the interview would be like.  We knew he was angry because we had not informed him of our mission report, which we had given in our home congregation. At the time I was profoundly grateful that he was not there.  We declined to Skype with him, partly because he is profoundly deaf, and a Skype session would have been an exercise in futile shouting.

Sister Twin called later (refusing to talk to either me or my husband, only talking to us through my daughter) and said he now just wanted to Skype to say hello and congratulate us. We declined this too, knowing any greeting would be filtered through her. We asked the sane sisters how this sister was progressing, and they told us things were not good. After several years of attempting to reach out to her, and a slow but steady response, she had shut herself off from her family and refused any communication except with two of the sisters. Her memory of her family life was unrecognizable to those who had lived alongside her.

Her twin brother, who had been so miserable for so many years, had sunk even lower. He had lost his job and got another one that paid less, and his wife was rumored to spend even more time with her job on the other side of the state to the point that she was rarely ever seen. He would not communicate with anyone except in resentful grunts.

We knew we could not avoid seeing FIL  indefinitely. We had to keep returning to our farm house to remove our belongings from it, and when our renters finally moved out, to clean up and repair and mow the lawn until we could sell it. We had to visit the old farmhouse where my husband's sister was taking care of FIL. We were assigned to the Spanish congregation of our church, which met in the same building we had attended before.

So I inadvertently bumped into FIL in the hallway one Sunday. He looked at me as if he knew who I was, but couldn't remember my name. He seemed puzzled but not unpleased. We shook hands. My husband said he encountered his father too, but he recognized him with disdain and would not shake his hand.

We talked with the Sister caretaker, who told us that in the 18 months since we had seen him last, he had nearly lost his ability to speak, due, in part, to his deafness. He often could not remember peoples' names, but knew that he knew them. He slept 12 hours at night and napped 2-3 hours a day. He would work in the garden several hours one day and was too exhausted to garden for the next three. He was unable to make the walk up to the mailbox anymore. He had left off talking endlessly of his experiences at college (over 60 years earlier) to his experiences in the war (70 years earlier) to his current subject, his childhood in the Rocky Mountains (nearly 80 years ago). He was regressing. The Sister caretaker found this a much better situation for herself to care for him, since he was asleep much of the time.

The biggest problem was that the Brother twin would spend time with his father, and when he left, his father would be stirred up and angry to the point of ranting for hours about subjects he could not deal with. This became so obviously harmful that Sister caretaker finally warned the Brother twin that he could only speak to his father under her supervision. Brother twin stomped off at this and has not been back. Sister caretaker says that FIL has been in a much better frame of mind ever since, to the point that when he sees my husband occasionally around the farm, he even waves and smiles, and at church he shakes his hand.

Before MIL's death, FIL and the twins were at constant loggerheads, especially Brother twin. There was shouting, screaming, cursing, refusing to bend, the futile making of demands, and other noisy demonstrations of wilfulness on all sides. FIL was never overtly antagonistic toward my husband until after his wife's death, which provided the twins an opportunity for constant provocation of the now un-supervised FIL. They only joined forces in order to express their common hatred and envy of my husband. After all, he laid bare--for everyone to see--the root of the family division and unhappiness, which MIL had worked so hard to alleviate, at the expense of her own life and health.

Upon reflection, I cannot say how much of what we have recently experienced with these personalities has come as a result of their own self-directed personality disorders or their combined desire for the destruction of the family member who brought the hard truth to the surface. I attribute FIL's sudden more pleasant disposition is a result of a long-hoped-for concession to his own mortality--a letting go of the unhappy and the unnecessary, but it is impossible to know how much of his anger was really his or the result of constant, needling provocation. He was entirely able to provoke his own anger earlier on, so I cannot say when the change came.

He fought it so hard for so long, and it is catching up with him. He is fortunate to be under the care of a loving and faithful daughter. All I can say is that the change of countenance is most welcome.

I do worry about the desperateness of the twins when FIL finally shuffles off this mortal coil, worried about how far their desperation will take them.

They are everywhere

We left for our mission in the fall of 2013. After 10 days of training, we flew to South America and took up residence in a little high-rise apartment in the city center. We met and worked with wonderful people, who have become close friends, in spite of language, culture, and distance. We traveled by foot, by taxi, by bus, and finally we bought a car, and traveled further. We had amazing experiences. And we ran into narcissists.

The first one was not actually a narcissist, although some of the symptoms are the same across mental, emotional and personality disorders. The third day we were in country we walked the 10 blocks to the office where we would be serving and met the wonderful staff of ladies, which included another volunteer missionary like ourselves, a local woman who was evidently depressed, negative, controlling, incompetent, unable to take direction, and interfering. It became apparent from the moment she arrived a month before we had, that she was a very troubled soul. She had not finished high school, had three illegitimate children, lived with her children's abusive father until his death a few years earlier, and as the only recipient of her late father's pension, was resented by her siblings. She considered herself an expert in marriage relations and was upset when we did not ask her to teach a marriage relations class.

Eventually the other ladies in the office confided that she had delusions of being in love with a young missionary, (she was 55 years old,) had driven people out of the office by lying about the staff, and had been thrown out of one apartment and had to find another place to stay. We visited the president of the mission and suggested she be evaluated by a psychologist, and this was done. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which, I have been told, is one of the most difficult and intractable of mental illnesses. The wheels were set in motion to have her removed as a missionary. In the meantime, we were told, we were to make sure she did not feel any pressure for the remaining weeks she would be with us. In other words, we were to babysit her in the now-empty office. When she got very tense, she would start cleaning, so for those weeks our office was extremely clean. The church leaders who recommended her as a missionary knew of her mental problems, but sent her anyway, perhaps thinking she would improve with distance--although serving as a missionary is fairly stressful, especially for those who cannot tolerate a change of circumstances.

When she finally took her two-hour bus ride home, we began to pick up the pieces and build the volunteer office services back to previous levels. The delightful office manager, Rosa, was known and loved far and wide, and with our efforts and the efforts of the faithful office staff, we eventually had many people coming for help with education and jobs. It was very rewarding.

In order to further develop this initiative, a well-paid manager was hired by the church to administer the program over a large geographical area. He moved his family closer to the office and began spending time with us. From the beginning my husband recognized him as another controlling, self-involved person, who although competent in financial matters, was without consideration of any kind for much of anything else, apparently unaware that the faithful staff were not slaves there to make him look good, but long-time volunteers who had worked without pay to accomplish more than he could. He seemed content with driving people away from the office because they were too poor, too humble, and less than he was. He tried to control all our movements, claiming it was instructions from his superior, although his superior disavowed that he had given any such instructions. Eventually we contacted the program headquarters in the U.S. and were told to break with him and continue with our own initiatives. He drove away four of the seven local volunteers. We spent far less time in the office, and tried to mitigate the damage he was doing and the plight of the remaining office volunteers.

Over a year of trying to compensate for the incompetent manager and protect the remaining volunteers became so wearing on my husband, that he developed the symptoms of and was eventually diagnosed with a chronic medical condition. We were told not to have contact with the manager anymore. My husband needed medical attention at home. The office ladies were heartbroken. We wrote up our last report, said our goodbyes to those we had come to know and love, and made the return trip to the United States, where our children took good care of us while we rested, bought a new home,  and began to re-establish the life we had left. My husband paid close attention to his chronic condition, which is now under control through diet.

We look back and try to reconcile what happened to us. On the whole we had a wonderful experience, fell in love with the country and its people, and wish they lived closer so we could visit them whenever we wanted. It was an eye-opening adventure, and we loved it all. But one person was able to make everything so difficult, and was so destructive to the program we were trying to build and improve. The negative effect he had on faithful, humble church members was appalling. From what we know of personalities like this, they do not believe they are capable of doing anything wrong, and will not take instruction, even though they are afforded chances to do so. We wonder if his superiors will allow the program Rosa created with such care to be completely ruined while they discover this for themselves.

Post Script, November 2016: We have kept in contact with our friends in South America. Earlier this year, when Rosa retired as a volunteer in order to spend more time teaching her university classes, the other volunteers quit as well, rather than continue under the direction of the hired manager. The hired manager, unable to get anyone else to run the once-thriving center for him, closed it down and set one up closer to his family, where--my husband and I are sure--his kind-hearted and competent wife is probably running things for him.

Escaping the narcissists in our lives

I came back to this blog when my husband, who, never having any facility with electronics, suddenly found himself compelled to master the basics of the iPad in order to keep in contact with the sanity and order of our blessed United States, as well as scattered family members, while we live for 18 months in South America.

He was reading my other blog about our current adventures, and clicked the link to my profile, which lists the blogs I have started and abandoned. He started reading this one, and reminded me of it. I have been reading through it today, and although it ought to be a memoir of a difficult time in my life that I've put behind me, it isn't. Because even though we are living in South America, we have not escaped living under the shadow of the personality disordered and the plain mentally ill. I am beginning to think that this is God's curse on my husband and me: to take a stand against those who would suck the life, joy and pleasure out of you, and learn to not only stop it in its tracks, find ways around it, and neutralize it, but to teach others wounded by this type of person how to defend themselves.

We looked forward for years to going on a mission for our church. We serve in a fund which gives loans to students of all ages trying to improve their earning ability. It is gratifying, exhausting, and rewarding work. We studied our Spanish, saved our money, and finally were able to sell the cows, (our nephew having decided to go back to regular employment rather than be partners with us and his grandfather,) filled out our mission papers, and made the long flight to another hemisphere. I must admit that years along the way I really really wished we could have left earlier, in order to get away from the excruciating demands of the narcissists in our lives.

My FIL is nearly 90 years old now, having outlived his wife by over ten years. (She died when she was 78 years old, of pancreatic cancer.) Following his casting us off over the problem with the garden water, he went it alone for a few years, during which time he had his driver's license taken away for erratic driving (he earned it back by taking a driving class,) made spectacularly bad financial decisions such as buying hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of annuities, selling his IRA for the chunk of cash it represented and then having to pay thousands of dollars in taxes, and nearly dying from "grunge," the word the emergency room physicians gave to his super-bacterial infected toe which he broke by tripping on the side of the washing machine then shoving into a manure-soaked sock and boot. He was always one to tough things out. He refused to go to the doctor until one of the brothers-in-law put him in the car and drove him there. It took several days and a super-antibiotic IV drip at the Veteran's Hospital to get past the delirium. He was given a warning from the doctors to bathe more often, not obeyed.

When we finally came to the point where we were within a year of sending in our mission papers, there was still the problem of what to do with FIL. Although Brother and Sister Twin both declare undying love and devotion to their dear old dad (after years of nonstop hollering and cussing,) neither of them can tolerate him in their home for more than a few hours. We told the other sisters to get ready to take care of him until we returned. We looked forward to this.

My husband's divorced sister had been earning her living as a well-loved public elementary school teacher. She endured one terrible year trying to teach in spite of an out-of-control student, compounded by the lack of support and outright hostility shown by the new principal. During the school year she not only lost a great deal of weight, the principal wrote up a negative, accusatory evaluation on her permanent record.

Following this, she spent one rewarding year of teaching , and then returned to the classroom the next fall only to find that she had not only one, but seven out-of-control children. She was emotionally shattered by this, and had to stop teaching. She had saved up a lot of sick days. My husband, who had flown to a dairy meeting in her city, where he usually stays at her house, found her nearly catatonic, and told her he would bring her back to the farm in her silver pickup. He helped her pack and said she was curled up in the fetal position the entire drive.

It took a lot of time for her to recover. She was emotionally, mentally and physically very weak. She slept a lot,  listened to music, quilted, read books, took walks in the countryside, and helped me in my garden--better than becoming her father's garden-slave, which she refused to do. She cooked and cleaned for her father and visited her sisters. She returned to the school district more than once, to get a psychological evaluation, and to notify them of her retirement. The principal discovered that he could not keep a substitute teacher in her classroom for longer than two weeks. He was compelled  to re-write his evaluation of her. She told her father that she would stay with him for the rest of his life. He said it was an answer to prayer.

If I had someone taking care of me the rest of my life, this sister would be among those at the top of my list. She is loving, wise, musical, well-read, never annoying or overbearing, incredibly helpful and hard-working, and very pleasant company. It only underscores how lucky FIL has always been and continues to be, to have the services of his brilliant wife, his son, and now this daughter to compensate for his every flaw and to carry him on their shoulders his entire, long, long, life.

The truly sad thing is that this daughter, who remembers him during her growing up years with fondness, now has a greater understanding of us and her mother and why we acted the way we did and say the things we say. She uses every skill she ever had, working with ignorant small children, in a possibly impossible task of helping him learn how to think clearly, take responsibility, and judge less harshly. Although he seems to improve while living in her house for the six months required for him to be declared her dependent, the rest of the year, living in the farm house, since she gives in to all his demands that she possibly can, he reverts to his usual behavior.

Following our mission call and the exit of our nephew to greener pastures, we were in the process of selling the cows and preparing our home to be rented by someone else. My husband also saw to it that FIL's 50-year-old stacked lumber farmhouse was upgraded so it would be more pleasant for this sister to live in, by installing new toilets, a new bathtub, several heating and cooling units, new windows--that can open--throughout the house, a pellet stove,  a new washing room sink, and wonder of wonders, close-able doors in the upstairs bedrooms. This sister says when she closes the new door to her father's bedroom, which has very large windows facing the morning sun that traps heat like an oven, it lowers the temperature of the rest of the upstairs by several degrees. My husband also had the hired men disconnect the plumbing that allowed the barn to share the same water well as the house. He filled in the large ugly pit that FIL used to store old pallets he scrounged in town, which he used for firewood for the house's smoky, homemade wood stove. The pit was covered over with gravel, making a parking spot for her silver pickup. She of course was ever so grateful, even while FIL grumbled and griped and complained about all these changes.

During the few months before we left, FIL became more and more indignant that we were being allowed to actually go on a mission. This was odd since when we had first announced our intentions to be missionaries shortly after MIL passed away, FIL actually offered to pay for most of it. The bishop told us later that FIL looked forward to us being gone so he would be in charge of the farm again, but by this time his attitude had reversed itself. He went three separate times to talk to each of the three men of the presidency of our combined congregations, telling them how my husband had betrayed his family, ought to have his church privileges taken away, and should not be allowed to be a missionary. The last was following a meeting presided over by the president, after which FIL marched into his office without an appointment and demanded that we have our privileges revoked. Fortunately my husband's sister was caring for him by then, and accompanied him. She called the president later and apologized for her father's behavior, telling him that nothing her father said was true. FIL was certain that he was believed, and that we would be denied this opportunity, but we continued to prepare. He was visibly disappointed when he asked us if the president had said anything to us about his warnings about our lack of worthiness, but we told him he hadn't. Because he hadn't.

We have thought more than once that when it really comes down to it, it frightens him that we would abandon him.

Lying before God and the Law

I don't remember there being a lease, although it had nothing to do with us. MIL and FIL had made an agreement with Brother Twin six months after he left the employ of the farm, having worked for six months and never once earning his salary. This was a few months before the partnership papers were drawn up.

There was finally a showdown in which my husband told his father he would have to choose which son he wanted to work with. This was following a pattern on the part of BIL of threats, intimidation, not showing up until late and leaving early, taking off weekends (on a dairy farm,) whining and begging. My husband said he would no longer "work" with his brother because it was not worth his time.

After the recriminations were over, and the gauntlet laid down, FIL turned to my husband and said, "Let's go to work." He obviously knew who would actually do the work. But of course it was always my husband's fault for throwing his brother out.

Brother Twin had a string of jobs after that, non-high-school diploma-requiring jobs mostly milking the cows for other dairies, and when he was invariably fired, his entire family always blamed my husband. He finally ended up coming back to work for a landscape outfit, and then eventually went to work for a family-own dairy construction company as a foreman. He was valued by his boss, although the Mexican workers under him considered him lazy. The bottom fell out of the dairy construction business, everyone else was laid off, and Brother-in-law's wages were cut in half while he was working twice the hours he had been. BIL's wife would not share her professional income with any of her family, although she had paid for the replacement manufactured home on the hill with her inheritance when her father passed away.

I asked BIL if I could see a copy of the lease he had in his car (we had stopped to chat on the ditch road up to their trailer) but he wouldn't. So I wrote to the attorneys and they sent me one. MIL and FIL gave them a 50-year-lease at $1 annual rent (only paid for the first few years), including a clause that they could own it outright if the laws of the county ever changed in the future. (The laws did change; they tightened up even further.) There was no right-of-way. FIL had tried two years before the lease became effective to deed the land to BIL, but since there was no legal right of way, it was not allowed. Besides the fact that there was no access to emergency equipment. My MIL, before she died, expressed several times that engineering that document was the worst mistake she had ever made.

There were three covenants, two of them having to do with keeping the place clean, and a third keeping up the fences. None of them kept. We sent reams of background information to the judge, but he refused to consider any of it. We showed him pictures of the trash everywhere (I got screamed at for taking those, let me tell you), the Google map, and telephotos from my back yard showing the broken fences. The judge said he would rule on the covenants alone and not from equitability (emotional testimony) and I thought, if that is so we will win on it.

But he lied. He ended up ruling opposite, for the emotional testimony given by the Father-in-law, who maintained his attempt to mediate his quarreling sons, his desire to treat them equally, the fact that he had told his younger son he could mess the place up as much as he wanted, and he'd never required him to clean it up. It was painful to listen to, after hearing them argue with each other for years about BIL's failure to clean the place up.

The judge admitted that BIL violated the covenants he had signed his name to, but that he wanted to leave the road open for further litigation, which he warned against, and admitted that he was affected by FIL's testimony allowing BIL to trash the property. The judge also said the lease was an attempt to give the land to the son in contravention of the land use laws of the state. BIL testified that it really wasn't that bad of a mess. I was glad he left the rest of his family home; I couldn't take the histrionics. As it was, the defense attorney badgered me unmercifully, but our attorney thought I was a good witness and let him.

So the liars won, all three of them. For what it has cost them. I have always hoped the ruling haunted the judge, who consigned a family to filth and illegality and an immoral, degraded life that he could have ended with one ruling. It has haunted BIL, who over the last three years has become more depressed, unhappy, grouchy and cynical. It has given FIL a stout, sturdy stick to beat us with and blame us with, ever, ever after. Even though, as we remind him, he won.

Interestingly, the defense attorney who badgered me and who is at heart a decent man, eventually dropped FIL and BIL as clients. This occurred when the attorney called me in behalf of FIL, who was sitting in his office, asking if I would open the books to him. (FIL eventually reneged on his promise to gift his remaining ownership in the partnership to our nephew, his grandson.) The attorney asked me several questions which he told me I did not have to answer. I answered him freely. I told him I had recently put together a financial history of the farm and was perfectly willing to open the books on one condition: that all the children were present and they would have copies of all the financial records at the same time.

I did not hear from him again. When FIL came home it was eventually relayed to us that his attorney had walked out of the room and left him sitting there, and not come back.

It was our own attorney who informed us that FIL and BIL had been dropped as clients, and furthermore, they were now shunned by all area attorneys. I believe this has to do with the fact that FIL too often refuses to acknowledge his own signature even when signed in the presence of a notary public. He might be able to make unfounded accusations to us that we forged his signature or that he hadn't known what he was signing, but it didn't work in front of his own attorney.  I may be wrong in that, but I don't think so.

I could barely even stand to be around my father in law at all for the next year. It was a physical effort to be even in the same room with him. I wanted with all my heart to move far away from such people. I had never been face to face with such envy, such entitlement, such raw naked covetousness and such creepy dishonesty. FIL kept asking if we thought he lied on the stand, and we told him yes. He lied. He lied.

The only good thing that came out of it was that BIL's children finally found out the truth (that they didn't own the place and never would) and started acting a little more respectfully.

Epic Fail

It's been nearly three years since I've written in this blog. I expected that I would have written in it a few more times, and then perhaps deleted it. But I've found in the interim that narcissism is forever, and I'm still having to live with it.

Three years ago we were preparing for an unwanted eviction action against my husband's brother at the county court. Neither of the two local judges were going to be available, since one of the judges was my husband's golfing partner, and the other was wife to Brother Twin's attorney. So we had to wait a few weeks (after waiting a few months, after waiting a year or two,) for the out-of-town judge to appear via video cam, who was not happy to be there in the first place.

We had spent several years in negotiation with Brother Twin, who is on record saying things like, "I knew when we first came here it was a mistake," and "We thought your son could move in here when we move out," or "Give us six more months," or, "Give us another 12 months," and we did. What precipitated the action after believing lies like these, was Brother Twin telling us he was going to be gone for two years on a job in Texas, (a job that never materialized,) leaving his children behind to trash the place unsupervised. His wife had taken a job as a traveling nurse several years earlier and was in the home maybe 2-3 weeks in the year. My husband and I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it, asking him to clean up or move. Once that ball started rolling, we had to follow up on it--something unexpected in this family of rants, raves, threats, intimidations, and cowardice.

He did hire his youngest son and a friend of the family to clean up somewhat, mostly because they needed the work. The friend of the family told me the condition the yard was in, how he had picked up 200 three-gallon buckets (and how Brother Twin had hollered at him for disposing of them), how after days of cleaning his arms were black with grime. Some of the more valuable vehicles outside the fence (and on our land) were towed off to the metal recycler for the value of the metal in them. Other than that, it was hard to tell any cleaning had taken place. I had a bird's-eye picture from Google Maps of the two acre dump, and it was hard to look at. What couldn't be seen was where, outside the fence, Brother Twin had buried two chest freezers full of rotten meat since the electricity had been unplugged.

More negotiations. Our nephew desperately wanted them out. They threw trash, made faces, hollered at us to get off their road, let their dogs out to chase our cows (ten died, nine in a frozen pond and one run into a wire fence by a chasing dog), gave us a tongue-lashing when we complained about the dogs, and trashed the road with gigantic muddy ruts by running up and down at ninety miles an hour in four-wheel-drive vehicles. When the bridge over the ditch needed replacing, Brother Twin did not contribute, as he promised he would; the farm paid for it. When they let the fence around their house fall down and our cows got in their yard, they called up Grandpa and complained that we weren't feeding our cows well enough.

We were worried about Grandpa getting involved. Even though he promised several of the sisters that he wouldn't, it was something tailor made for him to imagine himself important: mediating his quarreling sons, prodigals both, needing his wisdom and steady hand; nothing about how he had spent the last 25 years hollering at one of them for making a huge mess, violating the covenants in the lease agreement, and not one word about how he had skirted the laws of the state in order to make the lease in the first place. How he and his wife had enabled a son who proudly wore the Black Sheep label by tempting him with a sick, insidious dependency, imagining that they could gently guide him into a better life and church attendance, when BIL's real intention was to make his father pay.