I expected this entry to begin and end with “Dad is dead.”  The night before, I turned off all the lights except for my father’s night light, a small wild-wood lamp made by my son Hyrum, and said good-night to my unconscious father who lay in the lamp’s low glow.  After sunrise, I lay awake in bed with a tired father’s Christmas-like morning mix of anticipation and dread, sneaking down the stairs ahead of the children for one last check on the piles of gifts before the onslaught of squeals and flying paper, in this case ahead of my mother, in this case for one last check on my father, who I anticipated finding cold and dead.  But, again, he defied my expectations of certain life’s end to flicker his eyelids and responded “Hi Rog” to my good-morning greeting.  The vivid yellow urine of yesterday dripped an angry opaque red.  Rosie said the red could be blood from the catheter insertion, but more likely meant failing kidneys.  He drank nothing yesterday, after all.  I swabbed his dry open mouth with a wet sponge-on-a-stick.  I smoothed Vaseline on his flaking lips.  I syringed a small dose of morphine in advance of the CNA roughing him up with rolling and changing and bathing and rubbing.  From the kitchen sink I heard him mumbling, and I hurried back for him to look at me sleepily and exhort me to “Be good, Rog.  Be good.”  I will, father, as if I know to do anything else.  Then I settled in to do what any other normal land-of-the-not-dead person does: I washed last night’s soaking pots and pans, and I set the garbage and recycling cans at the curb.  Mom asked me to pray with her last night, asked me to pray with her every night.  But what she really wanted was to tell me that she wants to stay in the house and not go to an assisted living facility after my father dies.  I told her there was no reason not to stay at home if she were healthy and mobile.  But I told her that I could not be her companion or comforter, that she would mostly be alone.  She liked being alone, she said, doing her simple activities, she said, her needlepointes and word puzzles.  I did not talk with her about what my own life might have in store.  It’s too soon.  The time for that will come, but is not today.