It always happens during the holidays

One of my all-time favorite pics of my father-in-law. I just love that look on his face as he lost a game of Battleship to his wife.

Some might say my father-in-law had questionable judgment. When I asked Hector for his daughter’s hand in marriage, my only employment was playing guitar and singing (badly) for latte and tips in a coffeehouse. I didn’t have a job and certainly not much of a future, yet he gave me his blessing to marry his daughter. When he did, he looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “I trust you to take care of my daughter.”

By the time Jennifer and I were married later that year, I’d secured more gainful employment processing timesheets at a large advertising firm. It was terribly tedious work, but it was work, and I felt like I was living up to the promise I’d made to Hector.

A couple of months after our wedding back in 1995, Jennifer and I spent our first Thanksgiving as a married couple at her parents’ house.

For the first time ever, their family wasn’t just four people — Jennifer, her brother John, and her parents Hector and Guddy. Now it was five, with me trying to fit in and be a part of this new family of mine.

We had the standard fare of turkey and gravy, but most of the rest had a distinctively Puerto Rican flair. Yellow rice with chickpeas (one of Hector’s favorites), beans with large chunks of yams floating around the bowl (Guddy made the best beans ever), and a distinctively non-Puerto Rican sausage potato stuffing that would have made more sense in the German Norwegian household I’d grown up in.

Tangent: I’ve always enjoyed telling people that our kids are German Norwegian Puerto Ricans. It’s a fun compilation of words to smush together.

I loved Guddy’s cooking from the start. She didn’t have a wide repertoire of dishes, but rather core specialties that I always looked forward to. When she usually made rice and beans, she used plain white rice.

On the first Thanksgiving, I learned a new word that has become a part of the shorthand lexicon Jennifer and I have shared throughout our marriage. Hector, apparently, loved the rice that got a little overcooked and crunchy at the bottom of the pot. He’d scrape it off and onto his plate, leaving the rest of us curious and wanting to try it ourselves. The word Hector used to describe this particular scoop of rice — of which there was normally only a single scoop available — sounded like “pagow.”

Pagow. Like a bomb exploding in the distance.

I never bothered to ask if I heard him correctly, but even today when I’m washing dishes, anything stuck to the bottom of the pot I think of as “pagow.”

“It means stuck,” Guddy explained that first Thanksgiving together.

Just now I looked up “stuck” on Google translate. The Spanish word is apparently atascado.

That might have been what they were saying. This gringo son-in-law of theirs never bothered to properly learn the language. But I can see how atascado could become “scado,” which I suppose sounds a little like “pagow.”

After dinner, I introduced them to one of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions. I didn’t get to do it often, but some of my favorite Thanksgivings from when I was a kid were when I got to see a movie either the day before or on Thanksgiving Day itself. The first time I remember doing this was on Thanksgiving Day 1983 when I sat in a near-empty theater and watched a 10:00 showing of A Christmas Story, years before it became a staple on cable TV.

That evening, Jennifer, Guddy, Hector, and I went and saw Toy Story, which had just opened up that week. We all loved it, of course, and couldn’t imagine in the next several years Jennifer and I would bring five kids into this world who would all grow to love that movie, as well.

I’d brag and say I obviously have a penchant for choosing which Thanksgiving movies would go on to become classics, but I’m also the same person who raced to see Supergirl when it opened Thanksgiving weekend back in 1984.

Once we bought our own house, our home became the primary hub for Thanksgiving over the years. We took over bird roasting duties and the sausage potato stuffing, but Guddy almost always brought yellow rice with chickpeas.

When we moved to Colorado in 2013, Hector and Guddy drove all the way from Georgia to spend that first Thanksgiving with us. I’d never seen Jennifer as excited to see her parents as she was that day. When she saw her parents’ car out our back window, she screamed in joy as she ran to the front to greet them.

One of my strongest memories from that week is of explaining the Liturgy of the Hours to them. We’re Catholic, but Jennifer’s parents had left the Church years before. This prayer of Psalms, I thought, was a perfect middle ground on which we could meet. I stood in the kitchen and read from the book of Christian Prayer, with my wife and in-laws repeating the antiphons.

In June 2015, Hector started not doing so well. Over the previous few years, he had dealt with multiple health problems, but now he had developed lung issues that the doctors struggled to diagnose and treat.

“Well, you have bronchitis,” they said at first.

Then, a few days later, it was, “No, it’s not bronchitis, you have pneumonia.”

Finally, with devastating clarity, they announced:

“It’s not pneumonia. It’s cancer, and it’s all in your lungs.”

They at first assured us that he could still be around for quite some time. But just four days later, as we scrambled to get kids out the door during their first week of school, we received one of those terrible phone calls that almost takes the air out of the room and makes it feel as if the world just stopped turning. The doctors said very matter-of-factly that my wife needed to get on a plane right away because Hector only had twenty-four to forty-eight hours to live.

We rushed to pull the kids out of school, pack the van, and drop Jennifer off at the airport. Within three hours of that phone call, I began the 1,400-mile drive back to Georgia with our five kids, hoping we’d get there in time.

Around two in the morning, I ran out of steam and finally stopped at a hotel for the night. As the children and I were stumbling toward the elevator in the hotel lobby, I received a text from my wife.

“He’s gone,” she wrote.

She had arrived hours before, told Hector she loved him and held her father’s hand as he died.

At the funeral people got up and talked about Hector and what a great husband he was, and what a great father he was, and what a great grandfather he was. As I sat listening, I kept thinking: “No one knows there was more to him than that. No one is talking about what a great father-in-law Hector was.”

No one knew of the inside jokes Hector and I shared. No one knew of the secret side glances we gave each other when our wives were talking, or that we signed emails to each other SIL and FIL (for son-in-law and father-in-law). No one knew that the only Spanish words I ever said to my Puerto Rican father-in-law were when I asked him if he wanted a cerveza, to which he’d usually answer, “Sí, sí.”

At his funeral, I was able to stand up and share with his friends and family that not only was Hector all the things they thought he was — husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and friend — but in his life, he became even more of what God meant for him to be, including father-in-law.

Hector didn’t start out that way, though. Hector started as a single man, and he morphed into this new role of husband, and then he morphed from there into a new role of father. Then he further morphed into yet another unexplored role of father-in-law, and then into a new role of grandfather.

His life, like ours, constantly evolved.

The day after his death, I found a note that Hector wrote in his Bible. To me and those who loved him, his words have enormous poignancy:

“Jesus Christ’s death on the cross was the beginning of the promise of eternal life with him. In my heart and throughout my life should be a longing for that promise. Help me, Father, to continue to strive for eternal life in the way I live my life today. Thank you.”

What a great treasure to find the day after he died. What a great identity to leave behind. I think Hector saw it fairly clearly. Hector was made in the image and likeness of God, and he strove to live as such. Did Hector make mistakes? Heck, yeah, he made mistakes. He never could fix that one cabinet door in our kitchen, for example, but he tried.

Also at his memorial, I stood up to say a few words and told Guddy we’d take care of her. I had no idea how difficult that promise would be, much more difficult than the promise I’d made to Hector all those years before.

A year after Hector died, we moved to Indiana, and flew Guddy up to live with us. In just one year of living by herself, we already saw a significant decline. Guddy spent hours just sitting, not even listening to the radio or watching television. We’d find her just staring into nothingness. She stopped eating unless we prepared it for her. We invited her to make our home her home, but she never figured out how to do that. Once Hector died, it seems like she began a long journey of her own toward her final destination.

In Indiana, Guddy came back to the Catholic Church and seemed to enjoy going to daily Mass with us. There was a peace she had there that she rarely had in our house. There, we all were constantly at war with ourselves as we tried to understand how to make each other happy, and why Guddy acted so differently than she had for all the years before.

After a couple of years, we decided to move back to Georgia. It was necessary for us to downsize, and we needed a change, so Guddy moved in with John’s family for a while. Jennifer and I both felt like we’d failed her. We’d made a promise to care for her and we couldn’t.

A year later, John and his wife came to the same conclusion we had: it wasn’t us. Guddy was declining. What we were seeing was not the woman who once made the best rice and beans in the world, but a woman who was losing the ability to even see the world before her.

In February 2020, we all made the hardest decision ever and placed her in the memory care unit of a nursing home. The next month, the world locked down.

We went months at a time, then, without seeing Guddy. And every time we did see her, she’d just cry. She’d become mostly nonverbal, and it’s been more than two years since we were sure she knew who we even were.

As I started to write this today, I started to outline my thoughts before placing them in proper prose. One of the line items I jotted down was this:

“Now Guddy is dying. I doubt she’ll be here next Thanksgiving.”

I had no idea when I wrote that this morning what would happen just a few minutes later.

In January of this year, Guddy had fallen and hit her head, landing in the first of several ER visits to come. Throughout the summer were several more trips to the hospital. She was falling down on a regular basis and one of those falls caused an undetected hip fracture. Soon, she was confined to her wheelchair.

Just a few weeks ago, in mid-October, we met up with John’s family at the nursing home. We brought a cake and a good number of Guddy’s ten grandchildren were there. It was also the first time that Hector’s sister, Lorraine, was able to travel to see Guddy. It was a wonderful reunion between those two. Guddy was still weak and in a wheelchair, but she did smile for us, and hummed along to Spanish love songs John played for her. Even if she couldn’t speak, and maybe didn’t even know who we were, something was still stirring in the recesses of her brain.

It was a good day, one that Jennifer really wanted to make happen. She’d felt a pressing urgency for some reason to arrange this gathering, and we were all grateful afterward.

For various reasons, it was nearly a month before Jennifer and I were able to visit her mom again. When we saw her again just ten days ago, her decline over less than four weeks was startling. She looked even thinner as she sat hunched over in her chair, and she mumbled incessantly while simultaneously pulling at her sweater non-stop. She kept tug tug tugging at the sweater, completely oblivious to everything else around her.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise, then, when a few days later the facility called to suggest hospice care.

“It’s not end-of-life care,” they told Jennifer. “But she needs help eating now, and could benefit from other things hospice provides.”

Everything moved at whirlwind speed after that. Within days, Jennifer signed an agreement with a service that immediately got Guddy a better bed. A series of hospital workers - medical, chaplaincy, social workers — were immediately visiting my mother-in-law to ascertain the situation so an improved care plan could be established and implemented as soon as possible.

It was such a tremendous, yet sad, relief to know Guddy will get even more care. These last few days have been a bombardment of emails, texts, and calls from the hospice service. For the time Guddy is here, we thought, we can be assured she’ll be comforted and cared for even more than before.

Then, literally, as I started writing these words this morning, Jennifer knocked on the door and came into the room.

“Hospice just called,” she said. “They said they’ll be surprised if mom lasts until Christmas.”

I took a break from writing as we called John and filled him in. Then I called my own mother, who had become friends with Guddy over the years. I talked with our priest, and we’re arranging last rites, and we talked about what we’ll need to do when the time comes.

When the time comes.

This time we have, of Thanksgivings and traditions, of rice with chickpeas and sausage potato stuffing, of in-laws and misunderstandings and saying goodbye.

Each day, it seems, is the day when the time comes. As I type these words, seconds are ticking away faster than I can finish a sentence, before I can finish a thought.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, Guddy is lying in bed with no memory of the memories she helped to create. She doesn’t remember seeing Toy Story on that first Thanksgiving, or explaining pagow to her new son-in-law.

It’s up to me to remember those memories for her, I suppose.

And to be thankful for them.

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• Note: Some of these paragraphs — particularly about the aftermath of Hector’s death — were previously published in a book I authored a few years ago (no longer in print).

• I wouldn’t be surprised if typos were worse than normal in this one. Literally, this is the first draft. Thanks for your understanding.