Lately I’ve been reflecting on a story (or is it a legend?) from my own family history. If any of my siblings or cousins read this, please know: I don’t know how much actual historical truth there is in this story. I think the substance of the story is true. I’m fairly sure that if certain parts of the story didn’t actually happen, they at least were imagined by the persons involved. In any case, it’s a truthful story, if not a factually true one, and it led me into some insights that I think are useful. So…end of disclaimer!

Here’s the story.

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, my maternal grandfather was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. His wife—my grandmother—had been trained as a nurse when she was younger, so she came every day to his care center and helped the staff take care of him. At this point in his illness, he had forgotten her, and all the other members of his immediate family. But—and this part I know is true—he remembered his Mercedes. My grandfather was a successful businessman, and his good car was a source of pleasure and pride for him. For reasons passing understanding, he retained a memory of this car, even as his beloved family fell away from his awareness.

One day, after a few days of rainy weather, he turned to my grandmother—his wife—and said, “Nurse, can you make sure they put my Mercedes down there, on the opposite curb, so that I can see it when I look out this window? And can you make sure they wash and wax it?” My grandmother was a salty Irish mother, no taller than maybe five and a half feet. I can imagine her eyes narrowing as she heard this request. But she complied. She agreed to do this, and she went downstairs, drove home, took the Mercedes to the car wash, and parked it outside my grandfather’s window.

But before she did that, she drove the car to a street that—after the rains—had lots of mud along the roadside. She got out, went to the far side of the car, and kicked mud onto the clean doors and panels of the Mercedes. She took care to confine the mud to the side of the car her husband wouldn’t be able to see.

On one level, this story is a great joke. It’s a funny tale of my irreverent grandmother’s Irish temper, and her passive-aggressive response to her husband forgetting her. But as I reflect on the story, I think there’s more going on here. I think there’s something about the mud that speaks to her love for her husband, and her refusal to relinquish him to the inexorable darkness of his illness.

I think that her act of kicking mud onto the car was her way of insisting that there was some part of him that still belonged to her, and still knew her. It’s hard (if not impossible) to be truly angry at someone who is wholly unaware of your existence. You can have an abstract anger for someone you don’t know—for example, I spent eight years being angry at Dick Cheney—but the kind of anger that would inspire this muddy scenario is an intimate anger, a loving anger. If she had fully accepted the tragedy of his illness, and said her final goodbyes to him, she would not have acted on—or even felt—this anger. I think there was something resembling faith and love in this act of hers. She wasn’t going to fully let him go, not while he was still physically alive, and still interacting with her.

In short, if she had simply washed the car and parked it outside his window, I think she would have devolved into one of his nurses. He would have lost his wife, and she would have lost her husband.

I’ve worked with couples at all the different phases of the relationship cycle: new couples, couples married for 40 years, and couples in between. And I have two friends who have been married for (no kidding!) 62 years. Sometimes I think that my job is simple. My job is this: to help and support people who want someone in their life who will kick mud onto their Mercedes, and want to be the kind of person who would kick that mud. My grandmother’s comical Irish anger was actually (if you ask me) just another gift of love to her beloved spouse, another way to say to him, “I love you, dear one. I love you so much that I will reserve my deepest rage for you!”

I am thankful that I had a grandmother who threw mud on her husband’s car, right up to the very end.

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