I’ve been away. For a while. Since mid-February.

It began with an early morning telephone call while I was at Madrona. My mother had been taken to the hospital. She was gravely ill and I was needed to make decisions, as her doctor put it. My parents lived in Virginia, just outside DC, and it felt like the longest cross-country flight I had ever taken. When I got to the hospital, my mother was completely unresponsive. The next morning, for a brief moment, she opened her eyes and seemed aware that there were people around her, caring for her, but she recognized neither my father nor me. Medication kept her comfortable until she passed away a few days later.

Ours is a small family. I’m an only child. There are no grandchildren. “It’s just the two of us now,” my father said when I told him my mother had died.

My father is an extraordinary man. Everyone who meets him tells me that. A career military officer who left a promising future in law and finance when he was called up, for a third time, to fight in the Korean War. That was his second war, having served in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. There would be one more, Viet Nam. He retired as a much-decorated, high-ranking officer, but he never thinks of himself as more than a soldier. Now though, age and injuries have deprived him of much. Macular degeneration has taken most of his eyesight; his career in the Army Ordnance Corps that kept him near munitions and test ranges left him severely hearing-impaired; residual nerve damage from a broken neck suffered when he was in his sixties produces tremors in his hands and forearms so strong that it is impossible for him to button his shirt, or put on his hearing aids, or sign his name.

Over the last ten years, as my father’s condition worsened, my mother had assumed full responsibility for his care and for their household. She refused any help as adamantly as she refused any conversation about his care. “What if you aren’t able to take care of him, for whatever reason?” I had asked her last autumn. “Have you made any contingency plans?” “I don’t need to,” she answered, “that won’t happen.” At last she relented. Two days before she was hospitalized she finally allowed someone into her home.

So, it was the two of us—my father and I—and the home health aide, who was with him during the day. But it was not safe for him to be alone at night, and he was understandably uncomfortable with a stranger watching over him as he slept. He had enough of that during the day, he wanted a familiar face or none at all during the night. Though he never asked, I knew that it was my turn to take care of him, just as he had always made sure that I was safe and cared for when I was young.

Then, two weeks after my mother’s death, my father contracted pneumonia. He was hospitalized briefly and released while still quite ill. His recovery was long and difficult and fragile. His physician insisted that he needed a level of care surpassing the qualifications of the home health aide if he was to regain and maintain his health.

Toward the end of April, I drove my father to his new home, a spacious apartment in an assisted living community where he would have access to immediate medical care whenever he needed it, where there was someone to help him with his shirt buttons and his hearing aids and to make sure he got the correct medication at the proper time, and where he was otherwise independent, not followed by a stranger everywhere he went in his own home.

My father’s move meant that my parents’ house was now empty and their car sat unused. I came home for a brief weekend, then Jerome and I drove down to Virginia. It’s a daunting project, liquidating the contents of a house that has been lived in for thirty-five years. Some of the furniture had gone with my father to his new home, but most of it remained, along with all that one accumulates over a lifetime. Two lifetimes in this case. We sold what we could, discarded what could not be salvaged or used. The rest went to a thrift shop whose proceeds benefit the hospital where my parents had been. A contractor was engaged for a complete renovation and, finally, with my father’s enthusiastic blessing, the house went on the market in late summer, at absolutely the worst time possible.

That’s where I’ve been. There were lots of plans afoot back then, in February. I’m home now, picking up where I left off.