Difficult conversations targeting personal inadequacies and vulnerabilities seem to lodge choking in my throat for days, or weeks, or years, and sometimes forever.  But my distress pushed me into a chair to try.  I began by telling Mom and Dad how my physical health has been in decline, with the nurses recording my blood pressure—four times—at 200/100, thinking, surely, there must be a mistake with the cuff.  Google announced I was at risk of death, and ordered me to proceed immediately to the emergency room.  And then there is the exhaustion, feeling too tired to sit upright in a chair, and curling up on the concrete floor of my office every day, behind my closed door, waking always to the timer I set for 20 minutes.  Next, I recounted my worsening mental health, the depression, the mental fatigue, the hopelessness, feeling trapped and stuck, feeling the pressure every day of Mom’s and Dad’s conditions, of their very lives and deaths, waiting every moment for the next fall, cleaning up the messes in the kitchen and bathrooms, shampooing the carpets, the rusty weight of 100 things needing doing daily for their comfort and safety.  The third anniversary of my moving in with my parents, on August 1, has just passed.  The journey has been long and traumatic and exhausting, and I have felt desperate for a change.  But I am caught in this in-between world, living for them instead of progressing in my own life.  That change may be moving them to an assisted living facility and me finding a place to live, creating time and space to pursue my own dreams, to get married, to retire, to travel, to visit my children and cuddle their children.  For this particular difficult conversation, it seems, I chose the wrong approach.  They would hear nothing of it.  “You do nothing for me,” Dad declared.  I am doing just fine by myself.  The CNAs come every morning to bathe me and dress me and feed me and settle me for the day in my recliner.  Your mother applies the creams and powders at night for infection and fungus and pain.  I brush my teeth and use the bathroom by myself.  True.  All true.  “I don’t need you to do anything for me,” he said with iron will, becoming again the heavyweight fighter, the champion, pummeling every challenger.  Feebly, I jabbed back with a dozen or two tasks I do for him regularly, and he left-hooked and upper-cut each one.  Unfairly, perhaps, and desperately, I quoted Sarah, who told me before she died that Dad would have been in a nursing home two years ago if not for me.  “Sarah was wrong!” he denounced.  “I do not need to be in a nursing home, and I’m not going!”  And in a rib-cracker he told me I had manufactured all these pressures in my own mind, that they were fake.  “If you think you would be happier on your own, then move out.”  But you will find yourself more alone than ever, he said.  The only reason you’re alone here is that you retreat to your room.  You could socialize with us if you wanted, but you don’t want to socialize with us.  You run off to be alone in your room.