Personal History

When I heard my father’s voice on the telephone, “Can you come up here?” I said to myself, “It’s finally happening.”

I knew the day would come, but I had tried not to think about what I would go through when one of my parents started to fail. They had been in excellent health into their 80s, but no longer. My mother was seriously ill. I made plans to fly from Tucson to Oregon the next day to see what was going on and to help my father bring her home.

For 25 years, I had lived near my parents, usually stopping by once a week for an hour or so. They had busy schedules, doing volunteer work, traveling, reading, and spending time with a large circle of friends. My relationship with my parents was mostly adult-to-adult, although from time to time I had to remind them that I was asking for neither their advice nor their approval but simply informing them of what I was doing.

Every summer, they went to Oregon, took walks, crabbed, volunteered, and enjoyed being out of the desert heat. Two months before their last departure, my mother fell. Whether she had blacked out first and then fallen or was rendered unconscious by the fall was not clear. In any case, a cardiologist didn’t find anything significant, and I didn’t worry about the matter further. After all, I reasoned, these things happen to older people, even when they are one’s parents.

A month after she arrived in Oregon, my mother fell again, breaking her hip. She had the hip pinned under general anesthesia and awoke delirious. Recovery was slow, according to my father. For the next 5 weeks, he told me that she was gradually getting better in the rehabilitation facility.

It wasn’t until my …