#144 OR paper or plastic?

Just hung up on my ex mother in law. Again. She's called regularly over the last four (how has it been so long already?) months. Three times today, which is slightly above average, usually she rounds out at a good four times a week. I'm thinking about changing my phone number rather than answering. She leaves voicemails periodically. She's worried, I'm exiling myself for no reason, I need to talk to someone, she doesn't want to lose me, I need family...the reasons I should pick up that she comes up with have been interesting. I'm not entirely sure why she thinks she knows what I need, or why she thinks I have any family left now. An estranged uncle who communicates with me through our lawyers. I haven't seen him since...actually I have no idea. He phoned after my cousin's funeral and that was a good five years ago.

I'm not completely heartless; I answered the first few phone calls. Figured she'd settle down after a while, maybe switch to email or a call once a month or something. But she calls all the damn time! And I'm sympathetic, I really am (mostly) but what she wants is her daughter and I'm not a replacement. Both times I met the woman it was over her daughter's hospital bed. Each conversation with her and each voicemail reinforces how little she knows me. Nobody tells me I "need" to do anything, it's a guaranteed way to send me off in the opposite direction.

I don't really understand how families work, not really, so maybe that's part of my reluctance to answer. I left my abusive parents when I was thirteen years old and haven't seen a single member of my family since. So I really have no idea how to deal with someone trying to mother me, even my own mother never tried to and really, I think it's a little late in life for me to be adopting a parental figure.

I called her mother, after the accident. I was eerily calm on the phone, dialling, giving the news, hanging up, dialling the next member of her family. I met her mom in Hong Kong airport for only the second time; I never was one for grand family reunions, my wife went home alone each summer for two weeks. She was ghostly pale, holding herself carefully upright, I gripped her arm and by the time we got into a taxi, I was all that was holding her up. She was silent throughout the six weeks we spent watching and waiting and clutching onto threads of hope. Afterwards...she was in pieces. I arranged everything, filled in reams of paperwork, filed reports and certificates and got permissions, booked plane tickets, half carried her to the airport, delivered her to her wife in Amsterdam airport. Got myself, somehow, to London. Accompanied by two small, light, white plastic boxes. That's what I remember most clearly about the funeral home. A charming Cantonese girl with a devastatingly white smile asking me if I preferred a metal or plastic container. Like at the supermarket; paper or plastic? I laughed and hated myself for it.

If I could give her what she wanted I would do it. In a second. But I can't, because what she wants is her daughter and granddaughter. So while I understand that she's distraught and that I am a complete bastard...I still decline her calls.