Mom fussed over Dad as she and I left for Smith’s. “I will miss you,” she cooed, patting his hand.  “Will you be alright until we get back?”  At the grocery store, she pulled a sandwich from a bank of coolers, and whispered her excitement: “I’m getting this for your father.  He is going to love it!”  The sandwich looked unremarkable, but her whisper conveyed the pride and power of a simple choice and purchase, when so much has fled her influence.  She delivered the sandwich to Dad immediately upon our return, and looked chagrined at his request to add slices of sweet onion and slathers of mayonnaise and mustard, requests she perhaps thought challenged her whimsical magnanimity, rained on her pride, and poo-pooed her power.  But, in the end, they both happy munched on their lunch, with Special Agent Gibbs on the screen.  For the first time in a year, Dad successfully watched our neighborhood church services online.  Zoom has failed him consistently, with bad microphones making the speakers unintelligible with their underwater garble.  Frustrated week after week, he merely fell asleep, later receiving Mom’s report.  With polite urging from several congregants, including me, the three local congregations pooled their budgets and purchased the equipment to connect directly to the Church’s broadcasting system, with a dedicated camera and hard-wired mic.  “I loved seeing church today, Rog!  Weren’t the talks great!”    I stayed home with him so I could refresh the link when the screen froze from low bandwidth.  There are always things to improve.  But he sang from his hymn book, and appreciated the emblems of sacramental bread and water.  Walking down our street that evening, Mom relished the fresh air, and Dad admired the gold-tinged clouds, and a distant airplane flew by the moon, bright silver from the western sun, and Steve and Marla emerged from their house “to wave to the parade” of two wheelchairs, one pushed and the other motorized, and to say hello.  Nice neighbors.  But I cannot take my parents for walks often enough, and Mom aches to get out of the house.  I asked the Church’s women of the Relief Society if they could assign “sisters” to take turns picking up Mom every Wednesday for half-hour outings.  The “sisters” were delighted—“we just love your mom”—and texted the next day with September’s schedule.  Such nice neighbors.  I will report her adventures.

(Pictured above: a mere four hours’ effort to extirpate weeds and shape shrubs in the back yard.)

“Is today Tuesday?” Dad suddenly asked. “No,” I responded carefully, “today is Sunday.”  “Oh, right,” and he observed how the days melt together, for during all of these days he sits in his recliner reading bestseller books, except for the compulsory state and national news and political commentaries.  But I suspected this was more than the melting together of days.  He is forgetting, losing his bearings.  For my part, having made a study of grief and empathy in recent months, my word for the week is integration, by which I mean the perpetual process of welcoming into myself all of myselves: my fearful child and anxious adolescent, my flaws and brilliance, my wounded divorcé and bursting-with-proud father, all of my joyful wounded grieving giggling selves, the Me’s of every day and year and hour, with every cruelty and kindness meted out and swallowed—all of me, every bit, every moment—they are all here in a single whole Me, and I am working to love and to welcome even the unlovable and unbelonging pieces of my fractured whole.  Integration eddied and swam in my thoughts as I sat in the 100-degree sun ridding the grassy strip between street and sidewalk of tentacled clover choking the grass, for hours, my hands aching and my head pulsing with heat.  But I could not stop weeding.  Was I trying to impress Mom and Dad, or the neighbors?  Was my fealty working out a good son’s guilt?  Was I aching for praise, or craving perfection?  Dad cannot do it, so I will, and we will enjoy the results together.  On that hot afternoon, their bedroom registered 85 degrees Fahrenheit; my room climbed to 90.  So, I slept in the basement where the air always flows cool.  For reasons he cannot fathom, Dad stuck his gym on the armrest of his recliner, then stuck himself to his gum, which promptly stretched and gooed in his fingers.  Mom pulled out the trusty old (banned) bottle of Thoro and cotton-balled it onto his fingertips and forearm and the armrest and quickly dissolved the gum.  The room reeked of naphtha, and Dad complained of the chemical taste on his tongue even though Mom and I both washed and scrubbed the armrest with various detergents and covered it with towels.  “Thoro: The All-Purpose Spot Remover Since 1902!” the bottle title boasted, with the small-print subtitle, “Fatal If Swallowed.”  We really did try to be careful.  At least the gum is gone.

Three hundred ninety-two. An arbitrary number, I suppose, but a number representing at least three hundred ninety-two hours, hours I spent thinking about and writing and revising and revising these short creative non-fiction essays—is that what they are?—pieces of the story of a nearly-sixty-year-old divorced nearly-retired still-commuting lawyer living with his aged parents to help them keep living in their own home, living with their books and needlepoints and (mostly) healthy delicious food and television programs and recliners and all the familiarities of a long life together: 61 years and counting.  I was neither prepared nor worthy to be their caregiver.  What family member is, I wonder?  But I was available, and my lack simply does not matter: here we are, together.  Valeu a pena.  (Continental Portuguese: It was worth it.)  The New York Times delivery lady in the squeaky broken Durango has just tossed the newspaper onto the sidewalk.  Dad is sitting on his bedroom sofa reading volume “T” of the World Book Encyclopedia (1998) waiting for his CNA, his naked legs covered with a crocheted afghan throw.  Merilee no-showed last Sunday, so I had the privilege of a son learning the routine of getting a father safety to the shower, then drying and dressing him, while Mom went off to choir practice.  I will conduct the church choir today—“Precious Savior”—and am terribly anxious about being so visibly expressive and expressively visible, two-hundred congregants watching my waiving arms.  My pumpkin seeds have sprouted, and the deer seem to be leaving the landscaping alone, whether from the cannisters of dried blood, or the putrescent egg spray, or the dangling bars of Irish Spring.  I have placed little rings of stones around the volunteer juniper saplings to connote their belonging and because they look cute that way, cared for, embraced.  Dad has been wondering about the bottle of honey that claims to come from Uruguay, India, and Argentina, and suggests I next purchase a Utah brand.  Within minutes of the desert downpour last week the lawn care company mowed the lawn and left a rotting mess for me to clean up the next day: it was either rake for two hours or watch a thousand patches of turf suffocate under wet steaming clumps.  Three days later, Dad came motoring down the ramps, wanting himself to mow the lawn mid-week, and I helped him transfer from the wheelchair to the riding mower, surely a never-intended transfer, impossible of grace, but with shovings and heavings and unspoken curses and doubts I muscled him awkwardly onto the mower and watched him tool around the yard, utterly happy.  Transferring back to the wheelchair was even more ungainly and frightening: I doubt he will want to try again soon.  And last night the thick smell of skunk jolted me from sleep, a smell far beyond a smell, a noxious choking vapor that penetrates and lingers and reminds me of my former family-raising life in the country.