Janis says to me every week at church, she says: “You are such a blessing to your parents.  They are so lucky to have you.”  And Stephen, whom I respect, and who knows a lot more about caregiving than I will ever know, told me, “You must have the deepest reservoirs of unconditional love.  If you were Catholic, I’d nominate you for sainthood!”  (Wink-face emoji.)  He’d have to call me the Swearing Saint, I muttered.  And my great and good friend Blake: “You are amazing…you are preparing your place in Heaven with how you are treating your parents.”  Heaven, huh?  Hell, more likely.  Or some other type of purging Purgatory.  Where the angry and resentful and rude go to cool off for a few millennia while awaiting the Final Judgment.  I think I will need every one of those years.  “Help me get to the potty, Lucille,” Dad instructed her.  “I can’t!” she cried, at 85, barely able herself to totter about on stiff knees and hips, let alone support and swivel around his belly and buttocks.  “I’m not strong enough!”  Exactly so: you’re going to get her hurt, Dad, make her fall.  And so I wait—sitting at the piano, standing at the sink, cleaning up the kitchen, decorating the Christmas tree, piecing together a Dowdle puzzle, writing this Courage entry—listening for the effort grunt to become the falling-panic help-me I’m-going-down grunt, waiting for “I don’t know if I can do it” as he pivots from the toilet to the chair, a rotation of 45 miserable impossible degrees.  You shouldn’t be here! I want to scream.  But I never scream; I just seethe.  And at church, Janis rejoices, as if for the first time, as if with a novel thought, as if a newsworthy human-interest story, as if I beamed at her pretentious praise: “You are such a blessing!”  Go to hell.  I am no saint.  No way.  I’m just an angry lonely stressed exhausted resentful empty depressed anxious angry 60-year-old man waiting and waiting and waiting for the little event that will inevitably initiate the cascade toward the big end.  And Stephen, rightly, accurately, justifiably, gently encouraged me to try to be less of a caregiver and more of a son.  Point taken.  Touché.  But…I may have lost them both.

(Pictured: Stream in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah.)