My mom used the time while my dad was in the nursing home to get his room ready for his return, to be prepared for the newer challenges. She got a new hospital bed for him and a Hoyer lift--the days of being able to transfer him from his wheelchair to the bed or vice versa with just a transfer board were well past. She moved some furniture that had been in his room out to make space for a couple of pieces that held necessary supplies.

He came back home on Apr. 25th. Five days later, they had their 43rd wedding anniversary.

What can I say about this time? I remember getting updates here and there. For me it was a quiet but preoccupied time.

The day after he came home, I booked a trip home, flying in on the 3rd and back to to Boulder on the 7th. I never saw him in the nursing home and I can't say I regret too terribly not seeing him there.

We must have met with the representative from the nursing home on Monday afternoon, the first of April, because I was there for it, and I know I left Albuquerque Tuesday morning. It took me a while to dredge up these memories: that they'd been talking about a nursing home for some time, and had chosen a home near their house in Albuquerque. I remember now that there was some talk of him going to a home in Truth or Consequences, about one-hundred-fifty miles away from Albuquerque, that was run by the VA and specialized in ALS care. My mom nixed that idea, and so they chose a place nearby.

As best I recall, the representative was a nice woman, and the place looked nice enough in the brochures. As for handling the not-inconsiderable cost, at some point during the course of my dad's illness, the VA had declared ALS a service-related condition (he served during the Korean War) and given him full VA benefits, one of which was an allowance toward nursing home care. (When he got full VA benefits, he called the VA's declaration, with genuine gratitude and no obvious irony, "like winning the lottery.")

I flew from Albuquerque directly to Seattle, where I spent the next six days under oppressive Pacific Northwest gloom. I spent the first couple of days with a friend who was dealing with his dad's terminal cancer, though I mostly remember us adroitly not talking about what was going on with our families. On Thursday, went to stay with another friend whose 30th birthday had brought me and a number of our mutual friends out to celebrate with him. It was his time, as well it should be, and I think it's fair to say I was a bit of an asshole during those days. I wasn't about to burden him with everything that was on my mind during his celebration, but as a card-carrying introvert, my first step in processing is to take some time alone. Even under normal circumstances, not having that time alone after a difficult stretch points me directly toward an unpleasant mood. Throw in the dank Seattle weather (as a child of the desert, my mood in springtime varies so directly with the weather that you could legitimately hypothesize that I'm photosynthetic) and let's just say I was not in the healthiest mindspace.

Furthermore, events kept moving forward in Albuquerque. I got some updates via text.

From: Parents
Your dad will be admitted to Montebello on Friday morning. He felt we
had to move as quickly as possible because of his increasing
weakness. More later. Love
Wed, Apr 3 5:35PM

Friday rolled around soon enough:

From: Coit
In case you have not heard your dad is in the home. Nice place. And
the staff seemed upbeat and qualified. It overwhelming to see
him like this. I can see why your mother is so stressed out.
Fri, Apr 5 11:09AM

I must have texted back that I hoped it would prove to be a good choice, because Coit replied,

From: Coit
I hope so too for both of them. The next few days will be a
rollarcoaster ride for both of them. They have been together a
long time. Going home with jay not there will be difficult on
Karen. And for jay to be without Karen and his familiar
environment will be hard.
Fri, Apr 5 12:04PM

I asked my younger sister how she was doing:

From: Abigail
Exhausted. Exhausted. Sad. He is settled in and it was awful. I cried
for about 3 hours
Fri, Apr 5 1:11PM

That afternoon I went with my friends to Gas Works Park on Seattle's Lake Union. I separated myself from the group and called my sister. We spoke for a long time. It was really hard.

And by the next day, he was already hating it there and asking to come home.

My uncle Mike, my dad's brother, died earlier today. He was 90. My mom got the news from my Aunt Suzanne, the youngest of the four Lanin siblings and now the only one alive. Over the past ten months, Aunt Suzanne has now seen all three of her siblings and her husband die. I cannot but try to imagine what she's feeling. In addition to her grief, which is surely beyond my comprehension, I imagine she feels a great deal of loneliness, and a particular fear, too--how would you not find yourself thinking, "When is my turn?"

And what do I think and what do I feel? I tried to puzzle it out this morning. I was and am not particularly close with my dad's side of the family. I went to college in CT, where a substantial part of that side of the family lives/lived, and saw none of them more than twice, I don't think. I visited my Aunt Suzanne and Uncle Saul a couple of times in college and not at all during my six-year stint there before I moved to Colorado. Just before we moved, we found that my cousin Chrissie, Mike's daughter, lived literally up the road from us. She and I visited once or twice before I moved away. I hadn't seen Betty Ann since I was a kid, when a couple of summers we went to Atlantic City to visit. And both during college and during my later stint, I would meet with Mike from time to time when I went down to New York.

And yet I do feel a connection with my dad's family. I don't know if this connection is an act of imagination--a wholesale creation--or something real. (Does it matter? Is there even a difference?) So I am thinking and feeling today about what it means to lose someone to whom I wasn't close. Because I recall the times that Mike and I did spend together--visiting him in his office, the time Debby and I came down to New York to hear Yvonne do a cabaret performance, the visit to Mike when he was in the hospital--this last was just before we left for Colorado, and I was pretty sure it'd be the last time I saw him. But I went back to the east coast in the summer of 2009 and he and I had lunch together at restaurant near his and Yvonne's apartment. I remember as I left watching him cross the street in bright sunshine, an old man in New York, and wondering if I'd see him again.

There's a way that the past exist in your elders. Am I the only one who feels this? I know the Buddhists say that only the present exists but … it's like we all live as a timeline of ourselves, so that we are not a point but a length. I imagine us as these black lines against a white background. The lines stretch in both directions from the present, toward past and future. As they extend further from the present toward times distant, they fade, blur, lose intensity. And I see the lines of those around me. The closer a person is to me, the more solidly I see their line. As that person's distance from me increases, be that distance temporal or emotional, the blurrier their line becomes. And so the full imagining of myself in time is not a point nor even my own line but as kind of a cloud, which becomes fainter as the edges are approached and then fades away. At a death, one of the lines that makes up a part of the cloud ceases to be.

My recollection of that last time I saw Mike must be partly faulty, because when I first brought up the memory, I saw him crossing Sutton Pl. from West to East. But that doesn't make sense if he was returning home--their apartment is on the west side of the street.

There is something interesting about the faultiness of memory, isn't there? We can know something happened and feel something about the way it happened--isn't that kind of what memory is--and yet when I first brought up the image I must have had it wrong. Perhaps I was conflating when we crossed Sutton Pl. together to go to the little pocket park he took me to. It was July in New York City and sunny and hot. The connection between Mike and me, manifest in the events of that day and my recollections of them, was already blurring off toward the edges of the cloud. Today it is a little blurrier. I miss him.