Three weeks ago, I buried my mother-in-law in the garden.
Don’t worry, I haven’t killed her or anything. She’s not dead. She isn’t exactly alive, either. Strange, I know. It’s tough to explain, but I’ll do my best, since I’m still trying to wrap my head around the last few months after she moved in with us. Let me take your back a little…
My wife and I have been together for fifteen years, married for seven. All throughout our relationship, I’ve always had a positive connection with her parents. Her mother, Hazel, especially. She’s a gem. She’s always been super involved with our two daughters (4 & 7 years-old). She dotes on them constantly. She spends hours playing with them in the garden, pushing them on the tree swing I hung way back when my eldest was a toddler. She’s the world’s best grandma, that’s for sure.
Hazel is retired, and because she doesn’t live too far away - a twenty-minute walk, thereabouts - on many occasions, I’d return home from work and find her sat with a cup of tea on our living room sofa. She’d have kindly spent her afternoon doing a few chores about the house. The ironing would be done and neatly put away. Floors mopped to a shine. The bedding was changed and washed. She’s always on the go, and in great health for someone in her mid-seventies. Other than some mild arthritis in her hands that flares up during winter, she’s fit as a fiddle. Her father’s great, too. He was, at least. A lifetime of cigarettes, a bad diet, and zero exercise added twenty years to his actual age, and he passed away almost a year ago. I think that’s why Hazel likes to spend so much time with us. It’s a break from the loneliness.
Sure, there were times when my wife felt that her mother’s presence was a little too excessive. Like those sunny weekends when we wanted to enjoy some quality family time together - just us - Hazel would arrive unannounced, pull out a reclining sun lounger, and plant herself outside on the grass. She’d stay all day, soaking up the sun, and watching the kids play.
“Warm enough for you?” I’d ask, as I delivered her a third glass of cold lemonade.
“I could stay out here forever.” she’d reply.
She wasn’t lying, either. She often joked with us about building an extension, or a small summerhouse at the back of the garden for her to live in. It was obvious she was becoming increasingly lonely, and those passing comments about her moving in with us soon turned into serious discussions. It didn’t bother me. I loved having her around, and since she was practically living with us anyway, we decided to convert our spare room into a bedroom for her.
The arrangement worked out well - to begin with. She was there to collect and entertain the kids after school before my wife or I got home. The house was always tidy - she was very house-proud, and was constantly pottering about, sprucing things up. Having her there full-time was great, especially when we needed a babysitter for nights out with friends or an impromptu trip to the movies.
As weeks passed, we began to observe some changes in Hazel that only became more unsettling. Small things at first. She began to complain about constant back pain. She was always stiff and would lumber around the house like a shuffling bag of aches. Painkillers didn’t touch it. A brand-new mattress didn’t help either. We also noticed several warts develop in quick succession on her fingers. Her hands already bore the visible marks of arthritis; her knuckles appeared to have doubled in size, resembling knots in a rope. The onset of warts only accentuated her appearance. A few applications of at-home spray treatment temporarily removed the warts, but they reappeared within weeks, larger and meaner than before. A month later, they had spread further, to other toughened areas of her skin, like her elbows and knees. The soles of her feet became dry and cracked; her heels essentially crumbling away beneath her. She would leave dusty trails of skin wherever she’d walked barefoot. Lesions developed, which often became infected. My wife would soak her feet nightly in water with a moisturizing solution. She would later apply wads of petroleum jelly, and wrap them up in cotton bandages. The next day, when changing the bandages, we discovered something inexplicable: in the dark crevices between her toes, small growths had suddenly appeared, similar to those seen on potatoes that were too far gone.
It wasn’t just physical changes that plagued Hazel. She also underwent a series of unsettling mental shifts. We noticed she would slip into prolonged trance-like states where she would abruptly stop whatever she was doing and freeze like a statue. It was eerie to witness, but the kids would joke, “Grandma’s paused herself,” or “switch her on and off again.” Sometimes mid-way through conversations she would suddenly stiffen up, rooted in place, as if her limbs were gripped by rigor mortis. She began to sleepwalk. On three occasions I awoke in the chill of night and discovered the back door leading into the garden wide open. I found Hazel stood out there in the darkness, vigorously massaging her toes into the earth, digging deeper and deeper into the ground in a constant, repetitive action. She must have been out there for hours. In the end, I would lock the door and take the key to bed with me.
One of the most peculiar transformations was her height. Typically, as people age, they shrink for various reasons - bone density, aging muscles and joints, etc. Not Hazel. She began to grow. It was slow, almost imperceptible at first. We spoke in the kitchen for a few minutes before realised that I needed to raise my gaze ever-so-slightly to meet her eyes. Weeks passed, and Hazel’s height continued to increase as she experienced rapid and uncontrollable growth. My wife spoke to doctors almost daily. Blood work and scans revealed excessive levels of growth hormones and a rare pituitary tumor that was responsible.
What’s also odd is that for weeks during this period, my wife and I would hear strange, intermittent creaking sounds from somewhere in the house. Noises similar to those usually heard at night when homes settle and floorboards or door frames swell and shrink with changes in temperature. Strangely, the creaks we heard sounded closer in some way. As if emanating from something in the room. Then, one evening, I slipped out of bed and headed toward the kitchen for a glass of water when I heard the familiar creaking noise as I stepped out into the darkened hallway. I paused, listening for anything that shouldn’t be, and when I heard it again, I realised it was coming from Hazel’s bedroom.
I slowly pushed the door open and peered inside. Hazel lay in the darkness. Like a skeleton in the moon-glow, her feet and shins protruded over the edge of the bed frame. Although she had lengthened significantly over the week prior, I wasn’t surprised at how tall she was now; she had outgrown all of her clothes almost a month ago. Her bare forearms and gangly fingers hung from the sleeves of her cardigan by several inches.
CREAK.
There it was again. I moved closer to the sleeping Hazel and listened to her breathe. When it happened again, it dawned on me - the creaking sound was coming from inside her. I was reminded of bamboo, which can grow over an inch an hour, and if you listen closely, you can actually hear it stretch toward the sun. This is exactly what was happening inside Hazel. The source of the soft creaks that plagued us for weeks was actually Hazel’s bones extending within her. I glanced up at her face and saw Hazel’s pale, sunken eyes staring back at me in the darkness. She slowly put a long, gnarled finger to her cracked lips and whispered, “shhhh…” – then she quickly gripped my arm, her long fingers encircling my wrist like twisted branches. I recoiled, pulling free in a heartbeat. Hazel slumped back, quickly taken by sleep. I returned to my room, hoping that come morning Hazel wouldn’t remember a thing about it when I saw what looked like wood splinters embedded deep beneath the skin on my arm. They were exactly where she had grabbed me.
Hazel’s warts continued to multiply, many fusing together to create huge, unsightly areas of calloused, bark-like tissue that dried and hardened all over her body. Styes formed on her eyelids, enlarging and seeping a thick resiny substance that also hardened, soon replacing her facial features with a textured, husky shell. She also continued to grow, faster and taller. I went to bed late one evening, and as I quietly crested the top of the staircase, I saw Hazel shuffle out from her bedroom, ducking under the doorframe as she emerged into the hallway. I watched, unseen, as she slowly moved into the bathroom like some fantastical forest creature. Hunched high against the ceiling, Hazel appeared to have physically become the elongated shadows our bodies cast when the sun dips low enough in the sky.
It was clear Hazel’s transformation was becoming more and more aggressive. We spoke to more doctors, who explained Hazel had an extremely rare condition called Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis - also known as Tree Man Syndrome. In Hazel’s case, the condition was sadly both untreatable and irreversible. This, along with rheumatoid arthritis and severely elevated growth hormones, is what was responsible for the enlargements and stiffening of her body parts. Her limbs eventually grew and distorted to such a degree that it was impossible for her to move from room to room. Her toes extended into a complex tangle of root-like formations.
Hazel eventually stopped moving and talking completely. Her freakishly elongated frame was seized by total rigidity. Unable to move or speak, we didn’t know what to do, or how to help her, but Hazel’s fondness of the garden was always in the forefront of our minds. For that reason, I decided to start digging. Armed with a spade and fork, I set about loosening the soil in the garden. I chose the sunken spot exactly where I found her standing during her sleepwalking episodes. It took hours to dig a hole wide and deep enough to stand her inside without her tipping over. I backfilled the hole, leaving Hazel positioned upright like the tree she had unmistakably become.
It’s been almost a month since I planted her. A few days ago, I tied a rope swing to one of her arms that thickened and extended outwards.
I’m watching the kids play on her now.
Hazel always loved it out here.