Dear Carolyn: My sister-in-law, Meg, and I have been close from Day 1. We've raised our kids together and supported each other through life's lows and highs.
When my father-in-law, her dad, was diagnosed with dementia, we were a natural team -- plus my husband, of course -- supporting my mother-in-law. But when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, Meg just disappeared. She made herself scarce emotionally and physically. Everything was left to me and my husband.
My husband is physically disabled so he took on as many tasks as he could, but many many of the tasks fell to me. I did them willingly. I loved my in-laws.
Over those months, my mother-in-law repeatedly asked for Meg. Meg did say goodbye to her mom hours before she died. And then my father-in-law died.
Now Meg is back. She is asking me to do our regular things like swim laps at the Y or morning walks with a stop for coffee. I've asked her if we can discuss what happened. I'm not looking for an apology, but I do want to understand -- even if she tells me she can't understand it herself. Without it, I just cannot return to normal with Meg.
She tells me she doesn't owe me anything. And that just makes me so so so angry.
Does that make me a bad person? How do I move forward?
-- Moving Forward
Moving Forward: First let me say I would have a really hard time with this myself, in your position.
There was some ancient [stuff] between Meg and her mother. Ancient [stuff] that Meg never wanted you or anyone to know. Let's say, kindest interpretation, Meg didn't want it to affect anyone's memory of her mother. If it was powerful enough for Meg to want no part of her mom's end-of-life care, then it was big enough to affect people's view of her mom. And of Meg.
Here's why I'm making stuff up. I asked myself this question: What reason could Meg have for vanishing that would allow me, in your place, to accept it? This is what my mind came up with: big mommy issues. Though I'd still have ... reservations, let's say, about her I-owe-you-bubkes position.
Technically, she'd be right; her ghosting her mom's care didn't assign it to you. You and your husband still chose it because "morally we felt obligated" is not the same thing as "Meg literally forced us." But when people are as close as you say you and Meg are -- were -- such hairsplitting becomes almost offensive; it's the opposite of the kind of trust you built: "Trust that I had my reasons" trust.
Tapping into the latter is the point of this exercise, to bring you all the way around to feeling sympathetic to her -- as you know and love and trust her on a gut level.
Maybe you can come up with one; maybe you can't.
That's my advice to you, though: to try. Since that's the door she left open.
You barely mention your husband here, but he must have some insight into why Meg fled the scene -- having grown up with her and witnessed her relationships with their parents up close. Unless her reasons were entirely in her private family life now? -- and therefore not only still her business but also opaque.
Readers' thoughts:
- She left you holding the ball. That sucks. If you can, though, the kindest way to approach this might be, "I figure you stayed away for a reason, and I wanted to check whether you're okay." Especially if you know she isn't the kind of person to disappear without a good reason, even one she can't or won't share.
- Some people just can't handle illness and death. Meg may have been able to deal with her father's dementia knowing she still had her mother -- but faced with losing her mother, all she could do was retreat.