This is a story about how getting married and having children does not guarantee you won't end up alone and lonely at the end of your life.
I spent the past few days with my mother in law in southern Sweden while my husband went to visit his father in central Sweden. I have not seen his father since fall 2022, when I learned he had beat my mother in law. She hasn't seen him since about the same time either when she finally decided to flee him and move to the region of Sweden where she grew up. As of summer 2025, she is now divorced from him - this was facilitated by the fact that divorcing in Sweden when there are no minor children or shared assets and people live apart for a while is really pro-forma. My husband and sister-in-law got her to sign the paperwork to divorce this summer, and at 76 years old, she is a free woman. Her life is not all sunshine and roses and in many ways, watching her age is encouraging me to make different life choices so I don't wind up like her. However, she is doing so MUCH better than my father in law.
He is a narcissist with a lot of mental health issues and an overwhelming fear and mistrust of medicine and doctors. Since the summer, he has been in decline and is clearly depressed. But he refuses all medication and any physical therapy. He lives in an assisted living facility and is deathly afraid of falling so he spends most of his day in bed and is too afraid to walk to the toilet so he pees in one of those pee bottles. He did have a stumble on his way to the bathroom earlier this year that exacerbated this fear. He also has his own personal wheelchair which my sister in law bought as a way to bring him from the US to Sweden in early 2023 when he was really ailing. He spends most of his days in bed in the dark - not even watching TV. He does text a sort of girlfriend (someone my age) on a daily basis with his grandiose ideas about escaping to France where he will live in a mansion and have servants waiting on him. His lying in bed and terrible diet means he is losing strength and cannot get up by himself to pee in the bottle and needs the homecare workers to come help him to his feet.
His mental illness means he is deluded into thinking he has a lot of money coming to him from the sale of his home in Connecticut and that he is a millionaire. In truth, the house was foreclosed upon a few years ago, and resold by the bank. All his items were thrown out with only a little that his children rescued and put in storage, that is now costing them $300 a month. I know this because I helped my husband downsize the storage unit just before Christmas where we threw away 12 trash bags of absolute garbage (old magazines, used napkins and cups, trade show schwag from 10-30 years ago) that my father in law had boxed up and kept in the house. He cannot accept this is true and continues to live in his own imagined reality that he is a rich man being thwarted by the system. He cannot understand why his wife left him and absolutely refuses to see that he did anything wrong by hitting her because, after all, she was annoying him and not doing what he wanted her to do. He entertains himself sometimes by making the healthcare workers move things around for them and telling bullshit stories about his life. He can be very charming when he wants to be, but his charm has faded along with his strength and he instead spends his days in a kind of sensory deprivation so he can avoid his reality. This thinking is a lifetime of untreated mental illness and the indulgence of his narcissism.
When my husband visited, it took a while for my father in law to warm up, but he did eventually and they were able to reminisce about old times. I am glad for my husband for this - this man is his father and there is love. One thing my husband likes to do is to take his dad out to restaurants to eat since he cannot do this on his own in his wheelchair. But my father in law has become too weak to sit in a wheelchair. He has an arm that was affected by a stroke a few years ago that is tight and painful and has only gotten weaker and worse due to lack of movement and a refusal to do physical therapy. As a result, sitting in the wheelchair is painful for him, so instead of going out, my husband ordered food and had it delivered. Bad snow hitting parts of Sweden this weekend meant my husband's return train was cancelled, so he had to cut his trip short to return home.
I think my husband visiting may have been good for my father in law for a little while, but it will not change the state of things. The healthcare workers have said that he is making his own health worse, but under Swedish law, they cannot force medication or treatment on him. I really do wonder if my father in law will make it through this year. He is 75 and will be 76 in February. I have been thinking of how I will support my husband because I know this will devastate him. My deeper worry is that my mother in law will also pass soon. (I will deal with that when and if it happens, but I have started to prepare.)
The part of me that feels anger and injustice for my father in law's treatment of my mother in law and the many other things he has done to hurt people throughout his life is watching this man's decay with a sense of detachment and curiosity. Aside from the once or twice a year visit from his son who lives in another country, my father in law is dying alone. This is the manifestation of the threat I see being shouted at younger straight women on social media who are not married or who divorce - that they will regret their choice to not lower their standards and tether themself to a man and have children with him. Except here is a man who did marry and did have children, but because of how he treated them and the choices he made through his entire life (and the choices he continues to make to reject all medical care and treatment), he is the one actively dying alone.
I want to reassure those women not to lower their standards and not to force themselves to endure a lifetime of mistreatment and injustice and disrespect and abuse from a partner just to avoid dying alone because there is no guarantee they won't also die alone anyway.
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