A New Year - 2011

A new year has begun. The family home where we lived for 27 years was sold almost a year ago and I have been living in a senior's apartment block for over nine months. It's a good place to be for now and my husband can come for weekly visits. He is failing more and more and can no longer feed himself, stand up by himself, or dress himself and has difficulty with speech. Our married life is shrivelling to an end as my husband's abilities fade and his hold on life becomes ever more tenuous.

We celebrated 45 years of married life last May. The first five days were good - and then we came home to a house that was a disaster; it was late at night after a long drive, but before we could go to bed, we had to dig out clean sheets from our wedding gifts and change the bedding on my husband's bed.

The next day, the job of cleaning the house began. Every wall had to be scrubbed, piles of bedding to be washed that were piled up in the living room, and when that was done, a new floor had to be laid in the living room to cover up the open trapdoor leading to nothing in the basement below. As well, the bathroom and the living room were painted. We purchased a second hand chesterfield to replace the one with the springs poking through and by June 10th., 17 days after our wedding and 12 days after returning from our honeymoon, the house was livable.

That Sunday we drove to Osler to celebrate my youngest brother's 23rd. birthday, little knowing it would be the last time we would see him alive. When we returned home, my mother-in-law had arrived home on the bus from Grande Prairie and was furious that we hadn't been at the bus to drive her the two blocks home. Someone else apparently did drive her and then she was even more annoyed to find out we had cleaned, painted and fixed up the house while she was away. The implication was that she had left the house in a mess.

Since she then refused to speak to me, after a week we went out to look for another place to live and found a house in the neighbouring town of Nokomis. By the end of the month after we were married, we had moved to Nokomis. My mother-in-law's thanks for cleaning up the house were to announce to her son as we left that he had broken her heart. (She did mention that the house was much cleaner than she had left it but complained to her friends that I was obviously critical of her housekeeping.)

At the time, I was unaware that I had a damaged heart valve, a result of the stress of pregnancy three years previously. It took me some time to recover from all the cleaning and scrubbing of the house at Lanigan and left me without the energy to start all over again on the house at Nokomis. I continued to struggle with being bedridden whenever I exerted myself physically and spent much of each day in bed, conserving my energy to make supper for my husband and to look after my three year old daughter. It was not a propitious beginning for a marriage.

Three months after our marriage, my youngest brother was killed in a car accident. I had always been close to my brothers and hadn't known my husband long enough to feel really close to him so was left mourning on my own in a strange town. My husband's sister and her husband, who lived on the farm near Nokomis, were good to us and helped us through those first years of our marriage. When her husband died two years after our marriage, she had her own grief to deal with and turned to her mother for comfort so we lost an ally.

The summer after our marriage, we decided to take a trip to visit my husband's brother, who had not attended our wedding because he wasn't finished seeding. We had planned to spend two days at my husband's brother's farm and then go on to visit a friend of mine at Spirit River. However, my mother-in-law decided she wanted to come with us and we ended up spending ten days at the farm at Sexsmith where my husband helped his brother with farm work and we helped in the house and garden. My mother-in-law used the occasion to complain about us and ended up not speaking to us on the way home. My brother-in-law phoned after we got home and accused my husband, falsely, of disposing of his mother's furniture and didn't apologize after he was informed that this was not true. Our attempt at peacemaking by sending Christmas gifts for the children was requited with a letter telling us not to send gifts in future.

Prior to going to Sexsmith, I had gone to the doctor to enquire about free penicillin for my frequent sore throats due to rheumatic fever. When we returned from Alberta, the doctor sent me to Saskatoon to a heart specialist. I thought I was going for a penicillin prescription but instead, the doctor prescribed heart surgery. Although I had always said I would sooner die than have surgery, I had a child to look after so on November 1, 1966, just over a year after our marriage, I had heart surgery, which was very successful but took a long time to recover from.

While I was in hospital, unbeknownst to me, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law put the pressure on my husband to sign over half of his house in Lanigan to his mother. The following February, my husband told me that in order for the transfer to take effect, I would have to sign off my homestead rights since I had lived in the house for a time after our marriage. When I asked him if he had signed over his house of his own free will and if he wanted me to sign the homestead rights, his reply was "No" and so I didn't sign the homestead rights.

Later that month, my brother-in-law died and his wife went to live with her mother in Lanigan. In August of 1967, our daughter was born. Eight months later, we moved to a rented farm 10 miles north of the town of Nokomis. My husband sold his feed mobile, purchased farm equipment and a milk cow and was excited to be realizing his dream of going back to the farm.

We had a three year lease but quotas were low and we could only sell 10 bushels per acre during the three year period. Had my mother-in-law not decided to take us to court to force my husband to turn over half of his house, we would probably have stayed on the farm, but that was the final blow that forced us to leave. In 1969, when our second daughter was not quite two, I got a job substitute teaching in Nokomis and that saw us through until the next fall, when I got a librarian position in Davidson.

In June of 1970, my mother-in-law took us to court in Saskatoon. We found out later that it was not a regular court and the lawyer whom we had consulted did not provide us with good advice. The long and the short of it was that my mother-in-law, supported by her son from Sexsmith, her daughter from Regina and her daughter from Alsask, perjured herself to claim that her son had used her money to buy the house and she was entitled to half of the house. My husband claimed this was untrue but the judge believed her and instructed me to sign the homestead rights giving half of the house to my husband's mother. My husband had already prepared a legal document for her, giving her the right to remain in his house for the rest of her life and he would look after the taxes and repairs. She had refused to sign this because apparently her Regina daughter wanted an inheritance when her mother died and this would not supply her with an inheritance.

In 1969, my husband had emptied his bank account to pay off machinery bills to the Credit Union and my parents gave me $1000 to tide us over until I would get my first pay cheque in September. We transferred the house in Nokomis and the car into my name and for the next three years, my husband had no assets in his name. My mother-in-law had asked for my husband to pay her court costs and lawyer bills and since Judge Tucker believed she was telling the truth and my husband wasn't, he awarded her the court costs. She subsequently had my husband's bank account garnisheed and got $25. She then sent the sheriff out to take our car but the unit secretary warned me and I left to pay a school visit to Hawarden, one of the schools I was responsible for.

My mother-in-law than tried to get my husband to pay for putting a new furnace into her house. Finally, Gilbert Johnson, a Davidson lawyer, negotiated the sale of the remainder of the house to her and she ended up paying her own lawyer bills and paying my husband $1200 for a house that she had claimed was worth $10,000. In 1990, a year after she died, the house was sold for $2000, $2,800 less than my husband had paid for it in 1961, but there was a surplus of housing in Lanigan at the time and it was an old house that had had nothing done to it for many years. After legal bills, each child, including my husband, received $250 from the sale of the house. From a financial point of view, my husband ended up the winner, but from his mother's point of view, the whole thing made absolutely no sense, financially or otherwise.

After four or five years, about 1975, when David was two or three, friends invited us to attend the fowl supper at Lanigan. My mother-in-law was there and as we walked by her chair, she turned and invited us to come to her house for tea. The court case was never mentioned, no apologies were ever offered, but she never spoke to me either for the rest of our married life. The children and Clarence were fussed over and I was tolerated (but barely). The sister and brother-in-law who had instigated the court case never spoke to either of us again.

Now they're all gone, except my husband and the sister who started it all. My husband is in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair, has difficulty speaking and needs help with eating as well as everything else. His sister has just moved into an assisted living facility after receiving a sizable inheritance from her older sister, who died four days before my husband had the stroke that put him into a nursing home just over two years ago. My sister-in-law has achieved her heart's desire, my husband and I are no longer together and she has received a good inheritance of money. I recently read that winning the sweepstakes only makes you happy for a very short time. She's won her sweepstakes; I wonder if she's happy?