I hate my dying sister-in-law
This article is more than 5 years oldDeath can be brutal and shocking, says Annalisa Barbieri, and the things you are feeling may leave you looking petty after she is gone
My brother has been married for 20 years, a relationship with ups and huge downs. A year ago, my sister-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live. My big problem – and I share this with others in the wider family – is that I’m having trouble caring.
She has always boasted about her career, how she’s well respected and how well she cooks and dresses. If we don’t agree, she takes umbrage. She’s dominant, opinionated and judgmental. She starts arguments with my children and husband, and never apologises. She rarely pays compliments.
She’s a drinker who claims never to get drunk; obese, yet criticises my diet and gives me weight-loss tips (I am a size 12). I don’t dare react. Recently, at a family lunch, her only child (in her 30s, also an alcoholic) was abusive to a family member. My sister-in-law and brother did nothing. I calmly challenged her the next day. She screamed at me, denying everything her daughter said, reminding me she was very ill and that her daughter was having difficulty coping with her diagnosis. I thought she would hit me when I said they had displayed bad behaviour for years, long before the cancer.
My brother is in a neutral state about all this. He’s powerless, and doesn’t dare intervene. A few days ago, she accused me, for the second time, of not caring that she was dying. The first time, I upped my efforts, sending flowers and messages, and phoning after treatment days. I got no feedback. There’s no give and take with her, just take. I can’t help feeling the family will be better off without her.
Well, the good news, for you, is that she won’t be around for much longer. I’m not really sure why you’re writing – you’ve taken umbrage that she accused you of not caring, when you don’t, in fact, care. So your sister-in-law is right. Do you want not to care but to still look good? If so, you’re doing a poor job. Flowers and messages can cover up only so much.
She sounds very trying, and it can’t have been easy having her in the family for so long; and of course you don’t have to start caring about a person you dislike because they get ill. But it is unusual not to soften one’s stance towards someone with a terminal disease.
You strike me as someone who hasn’t experienced much death in the family, so I would advise that you might want – for your own sanity and self-respect – to start thinking about what happens when she’s no longer here. Death, when it comes, can be brutal and shocking, and the things you are feeling right now may well leave you looking petty after she has gone. Death also has a way of erasing our worst memories of the deceased, so be prepared for others to become selective in their recollections of her: you do not want to be the woman who ranted and raved against her sick sister-in-law. Think of the funeral.
The person you really need to be there for is your brother, and your diatribes won’t be helping him. His stepdaughter sounds equally heinous but, nevertheless, she is about to lose her mother. For your brother, being married to an angry, dominating alcoholic, who is hated by his sister – his whole family, even – can’t have been easy. Your brother isn’t powerless, but he may have decided, long ago, that a neutral stance was the most proactive, protective one he could take between two very angry family members.
You really have two options here: shut up, stay out of her way and support your brother as best you can; or both you and your sister-in-law need to admit that you hate each other, but acknowledge that she’s dying. Then you can establish what you can do to help and support her.
So no, you don’t have to like or care about her. But what you can’t do, any more, is harangue a dying woman, however awful she may be. There’s simply no point other than to make yourself look callous. She is dying; you’re not.
Send your problem to annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article.
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