Of all our friends and relatives back home, the one who was most determined to come visit us in Indonesia was my 72-year-old mother-in-law, Theda. I think she had always dreamed of traveling to exotic places, but she made the mistake of marrying a salesman who was always on the road, covering his territory. As you can well imagine, whenever vacation time rolled around, the last thing he wanted to do was travel!
She'd always assumed, though, that once he was retired, he would enjoy traveling to art exhibits and craft shows with her, helping her to hang her paintings and set up her booths. After a couple of those mini-strokes, he did indeed take early retirement, but never made it further than his easy chair, where he spent his time traveling from one television station to the next, instead.
I guess Theda saw this trip to Indonesia as her last chance for a big hurrah, and she was determined to make it work. If George didn't want to come with her, well, they had great neighbors who would keep an eye on him, and she had a wonderful sister who was a professional caretaker, who might come stay with him for a while. She began making her plans.
In early May, just before John was to begin his plant shut-down, and the kids and I were to head off on our big Disney adventure, we got an emergency call from John's brother. George had had another stroke. A biggie this time -- one that left him paralyzed on one side. There wasn't anything more they could do for him at the hospital, so they were moving him to a rehab facility. The rest was up to him. If he was cooperative, and worked very hard, he could learn to walk again. If he was uncooperative, they wouldn't waste their time on him. He'd be sent home in a wheelchair, and there he would stay. I suspect everyone who knew him was asking themselves the same question right about then: Was George's hard-headed stubbornness going to be his salvation, or his ruin? And what about poor Theda?
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