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.