January

It was the fourth of January. I woke up to my telephone ringing. "Morning", I answered to my wife as I used to. The morning was like all the other winter mornings. I was used to the fact that my wife sometimes went to her mother's apartment near-by to have her morning coffee when I slept late. "Mom's dead!" yelled my wife to the phone with a shivering voice. The phone call was not long for neither of us really knew what to say, the police was already there and there was nothing to do. She didn't want me to come over so I sat for a moment on the bed unable to think anything.



January gave me a freezing hug when I went to the balcony wearing nothing but my thin morning gown. I lighted a cigarette but I could not taste it. The snow fell heavily down. This winter had more snow than any winter in my twenty-one-year-old life had ever had. Some had said it was also the coldest winter for a thousand years or something like that. The first snow had fallen in October and had not melted away. It stayed in large drifts on the ground and would not melt before spring. Slowly I started to get a hint of my thoughts. The last time I had seen my mother-in-law was in New Year. We had had a couple of drinks in her place; she was sixes and sevens with her boyfriend and said many times that evening that she would not take him back. Even so, she kept the ring on her finger. Until death us apart.



I felt really bad. I had hated my mother-in-law for all the things she had done to my wife when she was a child. Alcoholism, mental and physical violence, everything. For the last months, she drank a litre of raw Vodka a day and on top of that, she had beer, liqueur, wine, anything... Every day she told my wife to go to the liqueur-store for her and every day she went. I had wished my mother-in-law to die but who in the end would want that to happen?



It was my mother-in-law's 51st birthday, the fourth of January. Yesterday she had been so happy about that. Five months later, we heard that it was not an accident; there was five times too much Rivatril among other drugs and alcohol in her blood. No message, no nothing. Only a dead body that would be found by her daughter.



I imagined how my wife went to her mother's apartment with her own keys with a smile on her face, ready to say "Happy birthday, Mom!" and give her the bouquet of roses she had bought the day before. She would open the door and smell the smoke of yesterday in the air. She'd see her mother still asleep in her bed; she'd go to the kitchen to make some coffee. Then she'd go to wake her mother with congratulations and the scent of roses. But when she'd touch her mother's hand when she'd not wake up, she'd notice that she's all cold. Cold, pale and dead.



This was where I was with my thoughts when I heard some rattle on the front door. I threw the cigarette away and went to the hallway to meet my wife. She came inside silent, eyes red and funereal. I gave her a tight hug and she started to cry again. Between the sobbing, she talked silently about her mother's birthday, the peaceful dead face, the cold and stiff body and how she would just like to follow her mother. I tried to calm her down but it was no use. There was nothing to do but just be there.



Then began the calling. I had to call my mother and tell her what had happened. We had to call my mother-in-law's relatives and friends, book an appointment to my wife's doctor and shrink for speaking, sleeping pills and tranquillisers. My wife's telephone kept on ringing around the clock, everyone wanted so show their sympathy for what had happened. She was crying all the time. Even the smallest memory of her mother made the tears fall on the cheeks. I had no time to cry, I had to keep things together, take care of the apartment, keep an eye on my wife and make sure she ate even the smallest bite every day and to be there for her. The time before the funeral felt long and I felt like January would never end.



My mother came the same weekend to help us with the funeral arrangements. My wife was totally unable to do anything and for a reason. Her dear grandfather had passed away just before Christmas and her father was murdered ten years ago. Her incarcerated brother and her few relatives in Sweden were her only family she had left. And me.



Before the funeral, my wife was in psychosis almost all the time. She saw things the others did not, heard voices and talked with them. When in psychosis, she had always become a five-year-old child and this was no exception. I arranged the funeral with my mother and put a cartoon on so my wife would have something to do. At the same time, I kept an eye on her so she wouldn't do anything the voices told her to do. Before bedtime, I read out Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter until she fell asleep.



With the help of social work and legal aid office, the funeral began to get in order as well as the big debts she had left us, the termination of the apartment and draining it. My wife was herself only outside of our apartment and, for example, when the priest came to talk with her about the funeral, psalms and speeches. However, it was a hard work to get her outside.



My wife's aunt came to Finland the day before the funeral. We decided to have a glass of wine before going to bed. After all, we ended up talking and drinking until the early hours. Somehow, it just got out of hands though just before Christmas we had watched resentfully my wife's uncles get drunk just after their father's funeral.



In the morning, we woke up around six 'o' clock. We all had had a terrible night; our heads were aching and hands shivering. We went to get a hot shower each, washed our teeth twice and hid the empty and half-empty wine bottles like teen-agers so that my parents wouldn't see that we had been drinking the night before the funeral. It was a beautiful morning; the snow came down in large flakes from the clear winter-sky like angel's feathers.



My parents arrived and gave us a ride to the cemetery because we had no car. We walked the long snowy path across the graveyard to the church where my wife's brother already waited for us with two guards on his sides. I noticed that my wife's wet eyelashes were frosted from the cold. The funeral was small, beautiful and plain simple.  And there, sitting on the first row beside my wife when the first hymn started, I cried for the first time my mother-in-law's death. Now I had time to cry. But January, it did not end.