This month, we had a death in the family. My Bulgarian mother-in-law, Nadia, passed away at 79 years old from a massive cancer tumor that had broken one of her lungs. And death can be a mirror - a mirror in which our convenient self-delusions crumble. I believe that we honor the dead by speaking honestly about them, and I’ve got a few timely musings to share...
You can spare my wife and me your condolences because we’ve shed not one tear in grief. She was already dead to us. She hated life. She hated everyone around her. She was in pain, and she made damn sure to spread pain. Wherever she is now, she’s certainly happier than she was for the last couple of decades.
What you need to know about my mother-in-law is that she was the kind of woman who smoked cigarettes while pregnant, just because she liked cigarettes so much. She was a product of Bulgarian communism, and as long as I knew her, ardently anti-everything Biohacking; anti-fitness, anti-introspection, and anti-any-kind-of-personal-growth-anything. And she paid a high cost: A couple of decades of chronic pain, sarcopenia, arthritis, and lung pain from her emphysema - karma for her sins. We lived near her for most of our seven-year marriage, and the most absurd thing was watching her ongoing suffering from the health problems that could have been effectively treated or cured completely by the high-end anti-aging supplements and Biohacking products I offered her numerous times. She was too proud, too stubborn, and too closed-minded (I’m not a doctor).
In the last year...
My wife managed to finally (almost completely) disentangle herself from the awful, toxic relationship they had for decades. Nadia was a classic narcissistic parent: verbally abusive, gaslighting, emotionally selfish, financially manipulative, and melodramatic. It’s a small miracle that my wife turned out as well-adjusted as she is. This probably has something to do with her grandmother, an angelic woman according to my wife, pictured together here...
There’s a faint hue of silver lining to her death: this year, my wife and I gave her the one thing that made her truly happy. She got to behold and hold, a few times, her beautiful grandson.
And yet, that happiness and pride she took in finally being able to identify as a “baba” didn’t motivate her to do any baba stuff. She couldn’t be troubled to come over and help my wife bathe him or take him to the park in the stroller.
Flashback to when I first met her...
I met my future mother-in-law in nearly the most awkward way possible. My then-girlfriend and I had been dating for about a month and would go at it like rabbits at every opportunity. She texted me…
“Hey Jonathan, Tuesday is my dog’s birthday. You can come over to our place, we can have a coffee, and celebrate.”
I responded…
“Sure, but don’t you live with your mom…?”
She assured me that her mother would be at work during the day. Not one to turn down pussy, I went over to her place around noon. She greeted me at the door with a smile and a big kiss, assuring me again that her mother would not be coming home anytime soon. We had coffee, gave the dog a special treat, and didn’t waste much time going to her bedroom, where we got right down to business. A few moments after our mid-afternoon romp, both still naked and intertwined with each other on her tiny bed, we heard a most unwanted click of the flat’s door being opened. Mom was home from work early. I jumped up and pulled my underwear and pants on in a tremendous hurry as her mother began hollering from the hallway. When her daughter had let me into the flat, she’d suspiciously closed the second door, and Mom knew that something was going on. Her mom would have just barged into her lock-less room, so she jumped in front of the door, barricading it with her naked body. For several minutes, they yelled at each other through the door until her mom agreed to give her enough time to get dressed. “Jonathan, she’s gone in the kitchen. I’ll deal with her later. It’s best that we just leave now…” she told me, but I found the whole situation hilarious, and I figured that this was as good a time as any to meet her mother, as she had told her that I was her boyfriend. I knocked on the kitchen door and saw the most grouchy-looking, yet surprised, old woman of my life. In my broken Bulgarian, I introduced myself, apologized, and left her to her cigarette.
I share the story in my book for men.
My last week has been consumed with a tremendous task: clearing the family home my wife has inherited of decades of their accumulated stuff. Nadia was always a shop-a-holic and in the last few years became even more of a “hoarder.” I’ve had to dispense with an excess of cutsey decorative stuff (that my wife doesn’t want around because it has her “bad energy”), unnecessary kitchen appliances, piles and piles of once-stylish clothes that I never saw her wear, along with ugly, old, creaky furniture. Her husband was also a shop-a-holic who accumulated mountains of now useless and outdated electronics, gadgets, and clothing accessories. But here’s what’s struck me: she had hundreds and hundreds of unread books.
I remarked to my wife, “How was your mother as ignorant as she was with this many books?”
She responded, “She didn’t read them. She would buy them, intending to read them, but never would...”
I quipped, “She was one of the dullest conversationalists I’ve ever met. If she had read only 10% of these, she would have been the most interesting conversationalist!”
In the nearly 8 years I knew her, I NEVER saw her reading a book. Why? The television, of course. Always on, always blaring, the news or some vapid soap opera. Then she got a smartphone, discovered YouTube Shorts, and her books gathered more dust.
I can’t bring myself to throw away books; it’s been a challenge to find storage space for her library. I write this eulogy over Black Friday Weekend, and I hope this gives some pause amidst the annual orgy of consumerism. My in-laws’ vapid consumerism was probably an overcompensation for the destitute state of communism they were raised in (although my family on the other side of the Atlantic is just as bad a consumer hoarders), and it didn’t make them happy. What would have made them happy, I think, would have been investing in...
Their relationship with their daughter (my wife),
Keeping their marriage alive,
Having a hobby other than watching television (or porn, in the case of my father-in-law) every day.
Cultivating a spiritual life (something more than attending Eastern Orthodox service a few times a decade),
Staying healthy: with exercise, preparing traditional Bulgarian meals (this is one of the easiest countries to eat healthy), or taking a few of the excellent health products I would have happily given them from my massive bio-prepper stash of biohacking stuff.
But they were utterly uninterested in these things. Too blinded by the comfort of consumerism, they were, and as I pile yet another load of their old things into the dumpster here, I’m struck by the emptiness of that consumerism.
Hopefully, that motivates you to spend less money this holiday season on meaningless things and spend more time and attention on your relationships.
That all said, today in particular and in the next couple of weeks, you can get some of the best values on the investments that you make in your health and personal growth. I’ve organized a 2025 Biohacker/Lifehacker gift guide here with some pretty sweet savings (some expiring today - sorry to get this to you so late!)
The Biohacking, health, self-care, and personal growth stuff we are into can sometimes seem self-indulgent or selfish. (I’m sure you’ve had friends and family who hand-waived it away as such.)
It’s not, and those who think it is damn themselves to a couple of miserable decades. Really, it’s the greatest gift to our future selves and those we love. It’s not a luxury, it’s the necessity.
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