Just came back from the funeral

Hi guys, I have just returned from my mother-in-law's funeral (I shall henceforth use the acronym MIL to refer to her) and I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts since it was the first time I experienced a funeral of someone close to me. I missed my grandmother's funeral as I was working in the UK when she died and this whole grieving thing is new to me. I am not an emotional person, I am a pragmatic person and I think that can come across as cold, even unfeeling or autistic to some who don't know me well. I've known my MIL for a long time now, since like 1999 as I met my partner in 1998 - he was running the London triathlon that year and she was in the audience. That was when I first met her and so I've known her for a good 20 years now. We've had a friendly, respectful but somewhat formal relationship - it was always friendly but I remember how I had an argument with her once many years ago about American politics and it got quite heated, that was when I realized, holy shit Alex, this is your MIL not your friend, you cannot lose your temper like this. So since then, I've always exercised a certain element of self-restraint when it comes to biting my tongue simply to avoid conflict - I note that this is not a courtesy say her daughter or her husband afforded to my MIL, so they often quarreled whilst I only ever had that one argument with my MIL. I will be treating you to the awesome music of Queen in this article as their music has been on my mind since I watched the movie Bohemian Rhapsody on the very long flight back from Santiago.

In exercising this polite restraint, I think it has made our relationship somewhat formal, even a little cold but nonetheless conflict free. I exercise this kind of restraint all the time at work, if a client or a colleague were to say something stupid (trust me, it happens more often than you think), I would simply bite my tongue and let it go just to avoid conflict. But if a friend or sibling were to say something I took issue with, then I would challenge them of course. Should I have done this with my MIL? I am not sure, but we never became close even if we were always friendly. So when we knew her death was imminent after a period of very long illness, I didn't really feel much sadness. She died just 4 days before I was due to leave for South America and I didn't go up to see her in Scotland because I felt it was pointless - at that point, she was barely conscious and even if she was, she couldn't talk and we weren't even sure if she recognized her own children. Mind you, my MIL had 3 children, 2 of whom stayed on her bedside the day she died, but the third one hasn't seen her in years and couldn't be asked to see her even when her death was imminent. Needless to say of course, they had a really difficult relationship and it was evident that he couldn't care if she was dead or alive. There was a part of me that thought, well if your own child isn't visiting you at this stage, then I don't feel bad for not going. We had a chance to build a relationship in the past but that never happened - I suppose the differences in culture and the age gap were way too vast.

So when I got up to my sister-in-law's house in Scotland the day before the funeral, everything seemed perfectly normal. I was playing with the dog and cat in their vast garden (yeah, houses in rural Scotland are massive compared to London) whilst my partner and his sister were pouring over a huge amount of paperwork pertaining to my MIL's estate. Then we made a shocking discovery: you see, my MIL cared passionately about the environment and if she had left all her money to some charity that protected the forests or wildlife of the world, we would have been totally fine with that. But instead, we found out that she had invested in all kinds of green energy schemes that looked totally dodgy - you see, when she was bored and on the internet, she would read articles about how to save the environment and some of these articles would lead to ads of investment schemes, promising their investors a reasonable rate of return whilst investing green and ethical projects. So we went through all the paperwork together and of course, none of these are worth even a dollar today despite the fact that she poured in nearly £100,000 into them. In short, she was swindled - these are non-transferable, non-redeemable, non-asset backed, non-FCA approved schemes that were not worth the paper they were printed on. Oh that moment when we held our faces in our hands in disbelief - if only she had just gone ahead and just given that money to charity. But of course, instead of benefiting the environment or any other kind of charity, she had given nearly £100,000 to some con men who have set up things like that to swindle gullible people on the internet. Good grief. My MIL has two grandchildren fresh out of university, starting their careers, working so hard and saddled with student debt. They could have really benefited from that money and I do know my MIL loved her grandchildren so much.

Did my MIL know that she lost all that money or did she die thinking that she was leaving a fortune for a family? I suspect she knew she had messed up really badly, but was simply way too ashamed to admit to to the family so she hid her mistake from the family until we took out the paperwork to deal with her estate. My MIL wasn't a stupid woman - she had a degree, she worked in a university which was extremely unusual for a woman born in the 1930s when most women were expected to have children and become housewives instead of pursuing a career. Yet somehow, she had fallen prey to the many spam emails and dodgy ads she saw on the internet. Now this started in the period 2010 and went on until 2017. In hindsight of course, the family should have stepped in and said, "you're old and senile, you cannot be responsible for your own money or you would do something utterly stupid." But my MIL was a respectable, intelligent, educated woman who slowly became more and more senile in her 80s and thus at some stage of this decline, yeah we should have stepped in but we didn't because she wanted to be independent and most of all, she insisted that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. But we suspect that she was probably way too proud to ask for help and too embarrassed to admit that she had made a mess of things - especially since I knew she was especially fond of her two grandchildren and thus had effectively messed up their inheritance. I'm not angry about the money (we had expected her to leave a lot of it to charity since none of her kids are poor today) and we are just regretting not having seen this coming.

My thoughts then turned to my own parents: if my MIL being a graduate and an academic could mess up this badly as a lonely, old, senile woman, then who is making sure that my own uneducated parents are not being swindled? Can I trust my parents to always go to my sisters before they invest a huge amount of money in some crazy scheme? Or would they be too proud to ask my sister for their opinion? My father is at the same age when my MIL started getting swindled. My MIL was intelligent but still got swindled, so what hope can I have for people like my parents then? Of course, everyone wanted a 'nice' funeral - much effort had gone into organizing everything from the eulogy to the readings to the flowers to the catering. We had to put all this aside and say only nice things about my MIL despite the fact that I had just witnessed my partner and my sister-in-law venting their frustrations the night before about all the things that were wrong with their mother. Of course, given the problems I have with my own mother, I can only understand too well what they were going through. Eventually the issue with the money was parked aside and we had to focus on the preparations for the funeral. So the next day, despite being very sleep deprived, we all turned up at the Catholic church for the funeral and apart from immediate family, nobody in the church was under 60 and most of the people who attended were well into their 80s and even their 90s. The absence of anyone who wasn't elderly at the funeral: this was to be expected at most funerals - it was such a sharp contrast from a family wedding I had attended recently where most people attending were very young.

I was left mostly feeling uncomfortable at the funeral - you see, my MIL is a Catholic and of course, the funeral was conducted according to Catholic tradition and there was a lot of hymn singing and praying. As an atheist, I don't participate in either but didn't want to appear disrespectful. And of course, I was feeling actually pretty sleepy given how poorly I had slept the night before - I was jet lagged as I had just returned from South America, I was in an unfamiliar house full of people and I had a lot on my mind when I went to bed, of course I barely slept so I was feeling like a zombie at the funeral despite having had a lot of coffee. I felt mostly numb, trying to stay awake. After the service had ended, I felt the need to get some air and escaped to the car park outside the church. That was when I stumbled upon one of the leaflets at the door of the church that my sister-in-law had prepared - it was a something she had distributed to the congregation of the church, informing them of my MIL's death. It was a simple statement, two photos and details of the funeral. I don't know what came over me but perhaps it was the visual cue of my MIL - you see, they didn't actually put a big photo of my MIL on the altar during the service, it was just her ashes. But to see that visual reminder of my MIL suddenly just set something off in me, I ran into the corner of the car park and started crying. I don't know what came over me but I did cry for the first (and only) time since she died. I then thought, okay, I have to go be social with all of these nice people who turned up for the funeral and I can't be seen crying like this. Duty calls. So I took a deep breath, wiped my eyes and then rejoined the rest. When someone asked me if I was okay, I lied - I said I felt nauseous and was going to threw up, that's why I ran into the car park. I don't even know why I cried, it was a spontaneous reaction I suppose, realizing that I couldn't even scream at her about those ridiculous investments she made. I work in finance, you have such intelligent children, why didn't she ask any of us? Why couldn't you have just talked to any one of us about it?

The rest of the day was a blur as I was so extremely exhausted. I regretted getting into a heated exchange with my two sisters on Messenger as I declared that our parents were too old and senile to take care of their own money, that somebody had to make sure they don't get swindled. My sisters tried to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about but given how frustrated I had felt, I was extremely unreasonable with them. I'm sure you can see where this frustration came from but it was wrong of me to take it out on my sisters given that they have the responsibility of taking care of our aged parents whilst I have effectively washed my hands of them when I moved to the UK. But I do worry about my parents - sigh, I can't stress how stupid they are, like if we weren't related by blood, I would have nothing to do with people who are that horrifically stupid. My parents often talk like totally uneducated folks who have really no clue about how the modern world works and they are the kind of people who get swindled easily. I don't want my parents' money - I just want them to spend the money on themselves or give it to charity. I don't want them to be swindled, I want them to be protected from their own stupidity and senile state of mind, that's all. My parents are not just hideously stupid, it gets worse: at least with some stupid people, they are aware they are stupid and will ask for help or advice. My parents actually believe that they are really intelligent (good grief) and don't need to seek advice, that's the worse combination - so they end up making unbelievably stupid decisions without consulting their children and then wonder why everyone is so horrified at their really awful decisions. Don't get me started. Dunning-Kruger much? And of course, how would I react at my own parents' funeral? I showed no grief at all at my MIL's funeral - only frustration (which I tried so hard to hide).

The long train journey back from Scotland took about 6 hours, thankfully I slept for most of it on the train and I am just looking forward to catching up on my sleep this weekend. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest, I just needed to scream and get this out - I am sure some of you out there can relate to the predicament of having low-IQ morons borderline retarded parents who are so horrifically stupid your only instinct is to save them from their own stupidity but you still somehow have to be tactful and not just utterly cruel about it when trying to help them. Many thanks for reading.