After days of dissolved fiber and a suppository, the hospital cleared Dad for discharge to the rehabilitation facility.  Sarah was pulled into the strange world of his hospital room for five days and nights, never leaving.  She supplemented excellent hospital care with all the little things an immobile old person in a hospital bed needs in order to not suffer too terribly: brushing his teeth, slathering his back with anti-itch cream and his bum with anti-bed-sore cream, alerting the nurses when his oxygen dipped, adjusting him so he could pee into the urinal, applying lip balm, shaving his sparse whiskers, adjusting the bed angles, changing the TV channels, ordering his meals, replacing the cannulas he kept pulling out, pulling up his compression leggings (he shed ten pounds of water, from each leg, in five days), listening to him prattle past midnight.  She hugged pillows over her face to block out the light and beeping instruments and snoring, not completely successfully, rising to his calls for help every 45 minutes of the night.  This list of little services yanked me back to the other hospital room, 14 months ago, and the other rehab, 13 months ago, and the other homecoming, 12 months ago, when I rushed to build the ramps.  “I’ll be out of here in three days!” he enthused to Sarah today with typical optimism and sudden delusion.  And just today he complained he could not do it, he could not stand up from the toilet or the bed or the shower chair or to dress, could not shuffle with a walker ten feet.  “It’s too hard.”  Well, that’s not an option, Daddio.  That’s a terminal philosophy you can’t afford.  You simply have to.  If you can’t do this, you can’t go home.  You can’t go home and burden Mom and Roger with all this because they can’t do it for you, and shouldn’t have to—you have to be able to do it for yourself.  So do it, so you can go home.  Receiving these necessary reports from Sarah, memories of 2022 began to seep in, along with their tension and terror and trauma, memories morphing into anticipations, along with new stresses and trepidations and traumas, of what awaits, of the care he will need, knowing his needs may often outpace my abilities and availabilities and resilience.  So, now, I am slowing my in-breathing and my out-breathing and reminding myself that memories are just that, impressions of things past, and that the future will take care of itself, day by day, and that Dad will work hard at rehab.  He will be ready for home, and I will be ready for him.  And we all will resume our routines to our utmost.  My lovely friend Liddy from the east shores of England, counseled me sweetly: When were babies, so small and helpless, we worried our parents.  As our parents enter their winter years, they worry us.  It turns full circle.  The feeling of exhaustion and defeat is at times unbearable.  But we find the strength because we have to.  We have to put our exhaustion to one side, if you will.  Something inside us will still fight, and we become protectors.  We do for our parents what they did for us in our time of helplessness.  We become our parents’ parents.  The experience your family is going through, and the feelings that go with it, allow you to be human.  You become each other’s heroes.  You develop a greater understanding of each other, and become wiser.  You are not, and never will be, alone.