But my mother-in-law turned out to be the perfect poultice for my sometimes-raw disposition.

The first night I met her, she came to dinner at my apartment with her son, my lover at the time, whom she was visiting from out-of-state. I'd made a cold plum soup which pretty much presented like a placenta in a bowl.

"Now, this looks interesting," she observed sincerely, as she nudged the lumps with her spoon. "Is this fruit?"

That was about the most critical thing she ever said to me.

However, once many years later (I think the twins were eight) when we sat together in the far back of a mini-van we'd rented for a family vacation, she ventured, "May I make a suggestion?"

She never had offered the slightest direction on how to run our family, except once to recommend that we'd have better luck selling it later if we bought a three-bedroom house instead of a two-bedroom one - and she was a real estate agent at the time. So, naturally, I was intrigued by this hint of intrusion.

"Sure. What?"

"Have you thought about a religious education for the children?"

Well, no, we hadn't. Ever. Our children never had been baptized, never been to Sunday school. We simply thought if you lived honestly and compassionately every day, that was good enough.

I didn't say that to her, though. I was too stunned by what she'd said. Not only because she'd always graciously minded her own business, but, moreover, in the ten years I'd known her, she'd never once uttered or done a single thing that could possibly have been interpreted in even a remotely spiritual way. I had a distinct recollection of my husband telling me he'd been lured to Sunday school by neighbors promising the incentive of learning to paddle a canoe. She never went though. The words "god" nor "church" ever had insinuated themselves into any conversation I'd had with her.

"I don't get it," I replied, after I shared my philosophy of living values daily. "You never took your kids to church and all three turned out to be good people. Why does that matter to you now?"

"It's just something I wish I'd given them she said. "Another part of life that they would have."

Was she talking about faith? This woman who'd spent the last weeks of her second pregnancy in an iron lung to survive polio and then, with two babies - one of whom would endure years of Shriner's charity surgeries for hips deformed by the in-utero disease - would have to crawl backwards down the basement stairs, dragging the dirty diaper hamper down one step at a time while her used car salesman husband was out drinking and tooling around in hotrods. It wasn't some church that got her through that.

Ironically, her succor likely was that which tormented her most: her mother. My husband's grandmother - regal, vain, literate, overbearing - had earned a college degree in journalism in the 1920s and had been the star of a popular Portland afternoon radio program, accompanied by a live ensemble, including a harpist. Her third husband was a well-to-do telephone company lobbyist with whom she entertained movers and shakers in the ritzy enclaves of the capital. She was mortified at her only child's choice for matrimony. This acned charmer unquestionably was trouble. When he pulled out five years later, leaving little ones behind, her scorn did not pre-empt her begrudging help. But financial support to her daughter came with an unending litany of "suggestions" and prescriptions for improvement.

"You'll want the blue woven woods for your window treatments. Don't you think that plastic tablecloth is too tacky? Do you want me to polish that silver if you're not going to get to it? Did you mean to have this much mayonnaise in the potato salad? I'll bring over my good dishes so you have something nice for the table. Why don't you get your hair done where I go? The spoon goes against the flat outside edge of the knife. The boys should tuck their shirts in."

No wonder her daughter was practically paralyzed. She had been flayed by the withering, love-leeching sting of relentless reproach. Fortunately for everyone else she cared about, my mother-in-law refused to visit that on others. She was one of the few people I've ever known who truly, unconditionally accepted others. In person, in letters, in phone calls, she radiated warmth, interest, acceptance, encouragement, and congratulation. She never brought it up, but of course she already learned the toughest lesson there is: you can survive almost anything, even your mother looking through you.

Maybe that realization gave her some peace, like a final surrender, like giving in or going under. Or, maybe years of emotional erosion, like the Pacific breakers which beat against the Three Arch Cape Rocks where she had moved (and where her widowed mother followed her), had left her heart so tenderly exposed that she simply couldn't muster a discouraging word toward another living being. Like the dull beach pebbles she scoured during long walks alone and then pummeled into glossy, gorgeous agates after weeks of tumbling in an electric sand-filled drum, her lovely facets shone. Whatever its genesis, acceptance was her faith and savior, from what I could tell. Generosity of spirit was her unspoken but adhered-to personal gospel. One I had dishonored.

At the close of one of our stays with her in her little two-bedroom Farmers Home house overlooking the bay (as usual, she'd given me and my husband the privacy of her room, her bed, while she slept on the couch) I was packing. The room seemed dim as I matched socks and tucked children's outfits together. I was appalled to see the glass fixture shielding the single overhead bulb was filthy. She hadn't washed it in years. I mean, really, what kind of person doesn't notice that? I cautiously climbed up on the bed, and reaching unsteadily, unscrewed the center knob, carefully lowering the square pane. I took it to the bathroom and closed and locked the door. I ran hot water from the tub, kneeled down, and repeatedly rinsed the glass, using Kleenex to scrub the sticky parts and to dry it. But the mattress was too unstable for me to thread the fob onto the bolt while balancing the shiny translucent tray with my other hand. Then his mom walked in. She was in mid-sentence: "I think that load in the dryer is done, honey. Do you want me to fold . . .?" She instantly calculated what had transpired. I felt callous and ashamed.

"That fixture looked a little wobbly," I sputtered sheepishly as I lowered myself to the bed. "When I tried to tighten it, it came off and now I can't get it back on."

"Well, thank you," she said. "I'll bet that darn thing probably needed a good washing didn't it? Don't you worry about it. I'm sure we can get it back on." She left to enlist my husband.

As I waited, washed with guilt, I was reminded of a reporter friend who, eager for an encore conjugal tryst, had traveled to the showplace home of a renowned photographer she'd met on assignment. When she arrived, he had waiting for her on the large coffee table in the sumptuous living room a new toothbrush. "It looked like you needed a replacement," he told her. She never went back. "How can you have a relationship with someone like that?" she had asked me rhetorically. For an answer, she probably should have asked my husband.

In that moment, slumped next to the open suitcase, I experienced a transcendent humility inspired by the gentle grace my mother-in-law practiced that I did not possess.

Now, jouncing along next to her in the van on a rural road, while the kids bickered in front of us, I worried whether she suspected there was something deficient in the upbringing of our children. I was a little alarmed. The scarcity of her judgment made it precious.

"Don't you think just loving someone is enough," I asked her.

"I don't know," she said.

The next time religion arose was at her funeral not too many years later. That evening, I l shaded my eyes to watch my brother-in-law tiller his skiff into the blinding blaze the of setting sun and the trio of siblings' silhouettes taking turns tipping her wispy remains over the gunnels. I recalled the inspiration I'd experienced trudging along that blustery shore the day before.

"Where I would see rocks, she saw agates," I had preached to the congregants clustered amongst the folding chairs, like birds on a wire: couples she'd sold homes to, bank tellers who'd worked for her years ago, fellow boosters from the Chamber's Dairy Days committee, neighbors to whom she'd ministered during divorces or deaths or whose summer homes she'd kept an eye on during the brittle winter months; her hairdresser.

Inside the postcard-size program, with a generic seaside sunset copied on the front, was a poem I'd found that morning while sorting through the drawers in her bedroom vanity. It was a small piece of paper, neatly folded in half, amidst unopened boxes of Christmas cards she'd purchased from disabled veterans' groups, a salad of ancient receipts, and jumbled nests of cheap jewelry and chintzy mementos her kids and grandkids had given her. She had written in her lovely, leaning handwriting on ocean-azure stationery imprinted with a white seagull aloft in the corner.

In five rhyming stanzas she captured the crashing magic of the coast. The final verse felt like something so intimate revealed:

We'll stand in awe that rocks and sand
Were fashioned by a Wondrous Hand
And give thanks that the mystic sea
Is God's most precious legacy.

I would miss her legacy: her grace, not certain where to find it on my own.