Unquiet
Things

Every October, there’s at least one or two evenings where the occasion of a “family movie” is called for. Yvan has two brothers, and both of their birthdays occur over the course of this month. This means that one of them flies in from out of state (the other already lives nearby), and now the whole family is together, and there are multiple dinners and lots of socializing and endless rounds of Olsen Olsen, usually a very tame movie or two …and very little time for me to watch and write about something scary.

This year, the time is especially important because their mother—my mother-in-law—isn’t doing very well health-wise. She was diagnosed with ALS, and she has been rapidly declining in the last six months or so, and of course everyone wants to spend as much time with her, and together as a family, as possible. My own family was never as close as this one is. In one month, I have more family dinners with these people than I have ever had in my entire adult life with my family.

This is not to say that my sisters and I aren’t close. We love each other dearly. But even when my mother and grandparents were still alive, we never really did these things as a family, other than, say, once a year at Thanksgiving. Whereas with Yvan’s family, for the past three years now, we have twice-weekly family dinners. (I do think this is a little excessive, but I keep my mouth shut.)

Much of that is due to the influence of my mother-in-law, who works tirelessly to keep everyone close. She is a very special lady. She accepted me immediately into the family when I first met her twelve years ago and never said anything about my shyness or weirdness or piercings or tattoos or changing hair colors. As a matter of fact, when I mentioned over a fish dinner a few years ago that I was thinking of blue hair, she very seriously considered it for a second and said, “Hmmm…maybe I should do that too!”

This is the woman who, when my first book was published at the height of the pandemic, staged a little book signing for me in her backyard with various family members so I could have “the whole experience!” And all of this is expressed with a gentle, lullaby-inflected Icelandic accent, which always makes conversations with her take on a dreamy, storybook feel. We’re losing her bit by bit, and these conversations are all but impossible now.

But we all got together for hamburgers and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this weekend. She sat next to me on the couch, and we laughed and cringed because it was funny and gross, and everyone had a good time, and I am glad.

The movie hasn’t been out for a long time, so I won’t get into it over much because I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone. I’ll just say it was a lot of fun, and a lot better than I expected, and that it’s always interesting revisiting future versions of these characters and stories from your formative years; perspectives and priorities are so different these many years later, and things like plot, for example (at least for me) become second fiddle to things like relationships.

I think I was mainly tuning in to see Lydia’s interactions with her stepmother thirty-six years after the original film. And I was not disappointed. You know what else did not disappoint? THE FASHUN. Which I think I can share loads of without giving any of the story away!

Day Fourteen of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021

 

 

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