It has been nearly a year since Dave died and this has been the worst year of my life.  I feel like every nerve in my body is on fire and I can't concentrate on much of anything any more.  I partially have my mother in law to thank for that. Her betrayal has affected me in ways I never imagined possible. I have been silent long enough.

I know that if I am ever to heal from the events that took place in the aftermath of my husband's death, I can simply no longer keep my feelings to myself.  I have pushed these feelings down and down and down, but they are now threatening to swallow me whole and pull me into the abyss forever. I have to do something. I have to release these emotions or I am going to disappear.

I wasn't ever going to say the things I am about to but it is not fair for me to have to deal with this for the rest of my life.  My way has never been to keep things to myself but that is exactly what I have done for the last  10 years, out of respect for the fact she is his mother. I just can't do it any longer without doing harm to my own psyche.

And so I will tell the story and trust me, it is a cautionary tale. It is about selfishness and betrayal, by someone I thought I could trust, who was supposed to be family.  Yeah, right.

Five days after my husband died, his mother invited me over for lunch and as we were having dessert, she announced to me that I needed to vacate the house and leave the farm. Of course, she owned it all but it had been our home for the last ten years. The farm was also how we made a living so not only was she taking away my home, she was taking away the last 10 years of our hard work and my livelihood. I was too stunned at that moment to have much of a reaction and I remember just sitting at the table babbling at her about something I don't even remember now.

(And by the way, we were there are her invitation in the first place, and this arrangement had been entered into with me having not much say about it and that was my choice, completely. It was something Dave arranged with his family and I wanted to stay out of it. I wish I could go back and change that. But, it was their deal. I just wanted to be with Dave, wherever he felt he needed to be and so there we were, living beside his parents. At the time, his dad was not well and he thought he owed it to them to be close.  We had wanted to try our hand at having a little farmstead and so he thought it was a perfect opportunity.  Trust me, as time wore on, I began to wish we had been just about anywhere else but living 300 yards from his mother but by then, we were so entrenched in our life there, leaving was nearly an impossible proposition. We talked about it often but after his dad died, it seemed like we were going to be there forever, which was something I never wanted.  Be very, very careful what you wish for.)

To say that I was shocked by this announcement would be understatement.  I was still walking in that barren wasteland that widow(er)s walk through, the one where everything is splashed across the void in black and white and shades of grey, where all the color has gone out of the world. I had not even completely processed that my best friend, my husband, the love of my life was gone forever when she dropped this bombshell on me. Just like that, no warning, no nothing. Just blurted it out over a chicken salad sandwich and some cookies.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by any of this. For the entire time that Dave and I were together, she never really accepted the our relationship. I don't know whether she secretly hoped that if I was out of the picture Dave and his ex-wife would get back together or what. (Of course,  that would never have happened, even if I had disappeared off the face of the Earth.  His ex sealed her fate with him way before I ever even met him.)

From the very first moment that his mother and I met, she was remote when concerned with me. (Point of fact is that when our original introduction was made, she burst into tears and fled from the room, leaving Dave, his dad and myself standing there in complete amazement at such behavior by a grown women.) Here in the south we have a phrase that says a person's "smile doesn't go to his/her eyes", which means it isn't real, it is put on, fake.  That is the only kind of smile she ever had for me..  That so applies to her attitude toward me. And I cannot recall anything that I ever did to deserve her derision, because it was there the moment we met for the first time. I have no rational explanation for it, nothing that I ever did to her, other than to not be Dave's ex-wife or because I was divorced myself. Who knows her reason but it was certainly not anything that ever happened between the two of us.

Our initial meeting set the tone for the next 15 years of our relationship.  We were living in a little house at Cape Hatteras and his parents came visit it. Almost from the moment she stepped in the door, before we were even introduced, she burst into tears like a child having a tantrum. It seemed strange to me at the time but I really didn't think too much about it.  Dave had his say with her and I thought that would be the end of it. I think she decided then and there that I was "the enemy" based on what her former daughter in law had told her. Since she had never even had a conversation with me and basically knew NOTHING about me, that can be the only explanation that makes any sense, as petty and childish as it is.

I have never, to my recollection, had someone dislike me before they even got to know me. In fact, many people like me...a lot.  She, on the other hand, had made up her mind not to way before she had ever even met me.  In retrospect, I am sure her ears were filled with the nonsense of the jealous ex before we finally met and that is okay.  Lies beget lies and once that starts it is hard to reclaim them.  And, truthfully, I can't say that I really took to her either.  I don't have much patience for women who act like spoiled children to get their way. For the entire time Dave and I were together, she always seemed aloof, distant and down right cold to me but in the beginning,  I chalked it up to our getting off on such bad start.

We talked often about his mother's attitude towards me and he always apologized to me for the way she treated me. He always reassured me by telling me that anything she said or did didn't matter to us because I was his family, not her. I wish that I had not been quite so inclined to ignore her,as he  said I should do. I don't think he had any idea what she was capable of, although he hinted at it sometimes. Of course, if she knew he had ever said that, she would have immediately become defensive and think that he was being ungrateful for all the things she did for him.

He wasn't, though. Just the opposite. He was extremely grateful for her support and help over the years, so much so that he gave up the last 10 years of his life living beside of her so that he could be there to help her if she needed him. He never said for sure, but I am pretty sure he promised his dad (who was very ill and eventually passed away) he would take care of her, so we continued to live next door to her long after we would have left otherwise.

I know that she always thought that I didn't appreciate what she perceived that she had done for me but the fact of that matter is that she never did anything for me...not  personally anyway.  I was married to her son, she did things for him, and so I received the benefit by proximity.  She never cared enough about me as a person to even ask me anything personal about my life before I met Dave or about my kids, family, etc. She simply didn't give a damn.

The fact that she was able to look me square in the eye just 5 days after Dave he died and tell me that she was renting our beloved farm to someone else confirms everything I have said so far.  If she were to deny it, she would be lying to everyone, even herself. She claimed that she could not afford to pay the taxes, etc. on the property and that she needed the income. (We lived there rent free for 10 years, in exchange for being there on the family farm. We didn't ask for that arrangement. It was offered freely by Dave's parents and had everything to do with why we moved back to North Carolina from Oregon. We loved Oregon and would not have left, had we not been enticed to do so. Or we would have lived nearer the ocean that we loved so much.) She basically told me to get out, over a sandwich and homemade cookies.  Just like that.  Who does that to the grieving widow of their only son?

I might believe those reasons she gave, if she had said any or all of that, before Dave died. If all those things were true the week after Dave died, why were they not true while Dave was still alive and able to talk about it and help me make decisions about what I was to do after he was gone? She certainly had every opportunity to do so. Dave stayed at her house on and off from December of 2009 until hospice came in during the last few weeks of his life (March 2010). Her house was so much bigger than ours and it was just her living there, so it just made sense.  Also, she wanted to be able to help with Dave's care and so, over the great misgivings we both had about it, we had hospice set up at her house.

At any time,while he was there,  she could have sat us down and explained her plans, her situation, given us any kind of hint as to what she was going to do.  Dave was completely lucid and functioning until the last 2 weeks of his life, so that was not a consideration. His mother had every opportunity, over the course of those last four months, to say something to us, and yet she kept silent.  Dave trusted her to do the right thing and wouldn't have asked her to make any promises about me and the farm because he believed her to be a better person than she proved to be. She not only betrayed me, she betrayed him.

And I know exactly why she didn't say anything. She was afraid that Dave would make her promise things she didn't want to promise. She was afraid he would ask her to let me stay in the house and on the farm when all she wanted was for me to be gone as soon as Dave was no longer alive.  The sad irony of that is that I would never have stayed that close to her with Dave gone. But, because the farm was our sole source of income, I would have required a few months to complete my growing season. By evicting me at the time and in the manner that she did,  my entire 2010 season was ruined and so I had no way to produce any income.

With no income and no savings (that was eaten up with uninsured medical bills from Dave's cancer long before he died) I was left not only very nearly homeless but unemployed and penniless.  My mother in law assumed that my parents would just take me in with open arms, which they did, but they did not have room for me and the trappings of the last 10 years of my life.  I have everything I own in storage, paying for that by selling off my possessions to cover the cost.  So far, I have had to sell many of Dave's things as well as those of my own, just to pay for keeping my things in storage.  I know many widows who say that they have trouble dealing with just packing up their husbands' things. Imagine if you had to sell off those things before you had even wrapped your head around him being dead in the first place.

Yet, through all of this trial, I keep coming back to one thing. The fact that Dave loved me so very much. Many times he told me he loved me more than he loved any one or anything in his life and that is more precious to me than any material things that were his.  I only wish that he could have foreseen what his mother was capable of and that we could have avoided this situation. One thing it has done to me is to make me so much less likely to trust people so readily, especially those who are supposed to care. Betrayal is a powerful force.