When you choose family, you also choose the family of your chosen family. In other words, you don’t choose your in-laws.

Marie Doris Harris Fisher Merrill would have turned 83 years old on Oct. 12. She was born in Monmouth, a small Maine town of fewer than 5,000 residents to a family that had lived on Wilson Pond for a hundred years.

Marie earned a degree in nursing in 1960. She married Jerry Fisher, but divorced him 10 years later. By then she had developed a professional reputation: Marie Fisher, RN, one of the first women colonels in the Air National Guard. So she kept that name for the rest of her life, single mothering both of her sons, Brian and Craig, in the process. My sons, Zane and Aidan, came to know her as Nana, but I referred to her as Colonel Mother-in-Law.

My working philosophy is a product of 1960s television situation comedies. You could say I learned about chosen family from “The Brady Bunch” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And what I learned about mothers-in-law came from Darrin Stephens’s mother-in-law on “Bewitched.” Played by Agnes Moorehead, Endora was, no surprise, a real witch, and an opinionated one, and watching her I assumed that the in-law relationship would be antagonistic.

In 1985, six weeks into our relationship, Brian and I drove up to Maine to meet his family. Brian had never brought a boy home before. Here was the plot complication: For the two years before I met Brian, I had been a strict vegetarian. On the drive, Brian advised, “My mother is pretty traditional. Like at dinner. If she serves it, eat it.” She served pot roast.

This much I can tell you: If you do not eat meat for two years, your body will forget how to digest it. I was sick for three days. Brian’s brother Craig kept saying: “You said he was outgoing, but the only going he does is to the bathroom.” Marie wasn’t sure I would last. I wasn’t sure I would last.

But last I did, which was unusual in Brian’s family. Marriage was a blood sport for the Harris clan. Brian’s Aunt Jeannie held the record with seven divorces. Brian, though, remains one of the only persons in his generation still with the same person, even after 38 years.

Marie did not treat me as a traditional daughter-in-law. I was more of an out-`did not get mad at me, even when she would have had a good excuse.

Like the day of the picnic. The year that my own mother, Nurse Vivian, died, I was especially sentimental. Marie was hosting a Labor Day barbecue, and I realized that there were no pictures taken of the Harris family as it was. Marie lived on Lake Cobbossee at the time, so I told the aunts and uncles and cousins to all go stand on the dock, and I would take a picture from the porch. Only after I had convinced 18 of them to stand out on the water and say “Cheese” did we hear the crack. The dock’s support beam had broken, and I had submerged every single one of my in-laws. Marie never even raised her voice.

Here’s the kind of mother the colonel was: whether high school basketball or Broadway show, despite working two jobs, she never missed an event her sons appeared in. She was the same kind of grandmother. She flew across the country for Zane’s and Aidan’s adoptions and baptisms, birthdays and zoo visits.

Here’s the kind of mother-in-law she was: every June she called and together we puzzled out the Hallmark Christmas catalog and who should get what ornament. And wherever Brian performed, she would fly in, have dinner with me and be my date.

Marie did not come to our illegal wedding in 1987. In her small town, married to a Republican, gay marriage was a bridge too far. But 21 years later, when it finally was legal, she called me and said, “One of the few regrets I have is that I did not come to your real wedding. I’d like to come to your legal one.”

We finally did then have a mother of the bride/groom, and I learned then that family means family. Sometimes that means apologizing 21 years later. Sometimes that means just showing up.

Col. Mother-in-Law passed away on May 11, 2014, the eve of Mother’s Day, having taught us that a life of service was important. We might not choose our in-laws, but we always deserve them.