Fishbowling - The Art of Internet Marketing

On Sunday, March 2nd, my wife’s mother passed away.  My mother-in-law was the matriarch of my wife’s family.  She was a widow before I met her having lost her husband suddenly due to a heart attack.

Ever since I have known her, for almost 13 years, I have found her to be a tough and amazing person.  She had debilitating arthritis in her hands that made the things we take for granted about everyday life very difficult for her to do.  Small things like turning the water off and on, using the car key to unlock and start the car, opening jars and bottles of medicine were difficult for her.  Still she persevered everyday.

In the last few years she had been attacked by a neighbor’s dog and was knocked down injuring her hip which led to an eventual hip replacement.  This slowed her down a lot and she started using a walker and a cane.  But even with these issues, she still got around by herself.

She would watch CNBC everyday and listen to all the stock reports and gurus and she became an extremely clairvoyant investor making very wise investments including owning Cisco, Microsoft, Intel when they were all charging up the Nasdaq ladder and recently Google during one of the stock’s tremendous run-ups.  What makes this extrodinary is that she doesn’t have a computer or online access and her first language was not English.

She was very generous to us at Christmas giving my wife and I money for our kids to save for college.  She was the link that held everyone together for the holidays.  Being a very religious person who attended church regularly, she made sure that we always prayed as a big family before the holiday meals.

She was always very nice to me whenever I saw her.  Although we could not communicate very well, since she her first language was Japanese and I speak English, you can imagine how our conversations went.  She would smile at me and nod her head when I spoke to her, at least I believed she understood me.

I will remember her, not only because she is my mother-in-law or my wife’s mother or my children’s grandmother, but because I will remember an amazing woman who was all the aforementioned things and more.

God Bless Her.

Chuck