The needling traumas of covid and ambulance and hospital and worry and the prolonged proximity of death have sapped away my strength.  I mope around feeling weak and muddy, freeze dried and vacuum packed.  The numbing emptiness is syncopated with gun shots of rage, often over nothing, like a spot of greasy mayonnaise oozing from the jar rim to the butter knife to my clean fingers.  When I spilled a tall glass of chocolate milk on the shag, the explosion lasted more than a mere moment, but there was nothing for it but to fill the tank with soap and hot water and shampoo the spot 613 times until it was cleaner than clean.  Mom watched me from her recliner, mute, helpless to comfort.  Dad has phoned her several times a day from his rehab room the next town over.  “Hello, good lookin’!” she cheers.  He complains to her about his lumpy hot cereal, the maddening miserable itching from his Grover’s disease, how he simply can’t do what the physical therapists are working with him to do—knees straight! butt in! chest out! you can do it! one more step!—what we keep telling him he must be able to do if he is to return home.  He tells her how lonely and bored he is, with little to do and no one to see, and how badly he just wants to come home.  At 87, he is again the neglected little boy wanting to be comforted, by his 63-year sweetheart, his darling girl.  “Well, you just have to do it,” she chastened.  There is little comfort in chastening, and little progress in coddling.  I have nothing for him, no words of compassion or encouragement, no enthusiasm, no “You can do it!”  Dad wants more than anything to be independent, and he wants to be tended and nursed.  He is desperate to go where he feels safe and loved, to go home, but he knows he cannot go to that blessed place in his condition—and changing his condition may require more strength of mind and body than he can muster.  We brought a bit of home to him, in his room, with yellow balloons, with vases of flowers, with wrapped gifts from her children, with pizza and salad and fruit and German chocolate cake, celebrating Mom’s 84^th birthday with him, and we ate and sang and opened gifts and cheered and took pictures.  And then we said good-bye and left, because that is how life goes.  Every party ends, and every good-bye looks forward to the next getting-together.