Raspy, distressed breathing, not a loud thump, alerted me to something wrong, and I found Dad lying on the floor quivering with total futility to move.  I verified he was not injured, then rubbed his back and encouraged him to just rest for a few minutes until he regained some strength, code for, relax while I figure out what to do, and draped a blanket over his bare legs and bottom.  Rising from his bed, he had taken two steps with his walker and collapsed, utterly spent.  “I have no strength at all,” he croaked, frightened and suddenly hoarse.  “I wonder if this could be the end?”  After his first fall two years ago, I bought a padded sling to wrap around his big chest and help me lift him, which I did now, hoisting him to his hands and knees, and I held his weight as he crawled to the couch.  More heaving brought his arms onto the couch, and my knee leveraged a hip onto the cushion.  From there I fine-tuned his position with awkward pushings and pullings.  The operation took all my strength.  Nick, the strong young nursing assistant, arrived and bathed Dad with a sponge.  He managed to bring Dad downstairs—Dad insisted on it—but I almost wished he hadn’t, wondering how I would manage to get Dad back upstairs and in bed.  He grew weaker during the day, croaking and coughing.  I served a dinner of baked squash, steamed spinach, and organic apple-wood chicken sausage, sliced for him into single-bite portions, and I watched dismayed as he stabbed his fork eight times into the plate, missing the sausage.  He began sentences only to slip into confused nonsense, and I wondered, Could this be the end?  At bedtime, I did not succeed in transferring him from his recliner to the walker seat, and he sank again to the floor, helpless.  “Just let me rest here,” he whispered, wheezing.  My morning strength failed me, my muscles ached, and I knew absolutely I could not get him up.  Our neighbor Josh is a big man who knows how to hoist big disabled men, and he ran over at my phone call.  Together (mostly Josh), we got him into the walker seat, onto the stair lift, back into the walker seat, and into bed, a pad tucked under him.  Mom is beside herself with worry and fear, and wondered to me whether this were the beginning of the end.  We will see how he fares in the night, and what the morning brings.  In the meantime, I am on call: Mom has instructions to wake me with even the smallest need.  Calm during the day’s crises, my own silent distress compounded during the day’s uneventful hours, and has grown in the quiet and dark of my room.