When we first met, the Son-in-law//mother in law relationship was material for every cheap stand up comic and cartoonist, and mine with Ruth fit many of the negative stereotypes.

She thought this New York radical Jewish Phd candidate had dishonorable intentions toward her chaste church going daughter. I thought of Ruth as a Missouri rube, content to keep house in her Southern California tract. At their first meeting at our wedding a year later, she and my mother had little to agree upon but their disapproval of their child’s choice of spouse.

42 years later that son-in-law//mother-in-law relationship had grown into its opposite.  The last fully coherent words she said to me were “Thank you for coming, you cant know how much it means to me.”  But when I think of what she means to me, I believe I can know that.

Though her decline in powers of sight and hearing and ability to walk was tragic, it allowed for a growing physical intimacy. Like a baby, I could put my arms around her, hold her hands, stroke her hair.  Until just before the end, she had the bright eyes, the warm smile, the easy laugh, the chiseled features, the lustrous hair and the sonorous voice of a pretty and vivacious lady.  And six months earlier, during a dark mood, when she’d said to me, “Don’t come back, I don’t want you to visit,” I felt crushed like a spurned suitor.

During the seven years she lived in San Luis Obispo, I visited Ruth almost weekly, at that familiar succession of  homes  at the Palms, at Garden Creek at Sidney Creek, and at Cabrillo Care Center—often in the company of one of her great grandsons, Ian or Lucas. Her critical attentiveness, her vivid memories of her youth and mine, her sharp humor and verbal brilliance provided entertainment and challenge.  We would take walks around the block, and later around the corridors, we would sit and drink tea, we would work a crossword puzzle together and talk politics. I loved bragging to her about her daughter while marveling at their similarities of appearance and their differences of temperament.  Ruth was someone I could gossip and share my problems with, someone understanding, sympathetic but also detached.  While her sight lasted, I would bring my computer and show her pictures of the family in Idaho, of our annual trips to British Columbia, of other travels far and wide.  She always acted interested and made me feel I was doing her a favor, but I was having the fun.

Her personality remained vital and inventive until the last.  She’d be embarrassed about moving slowly or losing her train of thought, as if this was something neither she nor others might expect. But as she apologized, she’d find a smart alecky way to express herself that would crack me up, and turn the awkwardness of the situation into a moment of delight.  When I try to recall the actual words they elude me, not only because my wits are too foggy, but because that’s a sign of what we’ve lost.

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