You get the text at work one day, the text you’ve feared getting for years, from your half-sister Jeanne: “Dad has fallen”. Your 88 year old father, whose mobility isn’t great to begin with, was found on his bathroom floor by a neighbor who noticed he didn’t collect his paper from the driveway the day before, or the next morning either. The neighbor entered through his garage door, knowing the code. Your dad had been there for a day, his walker was tangled around his legs, his MedicAlert bracelet and cell phone on the counter just out of reach.

He was rushed to the hospital. You find out later that while he was on the bathroom floor, waiting during that day for help that may never arrive, he made peace with God, prepared for his end. It’s with a complicated mix of relief and grief, then, that your family is told the reality of the situation: he is lucid, he is stable, but he has a litany of health problems, many exacerbated by the fall, and they inevitably will start domino-ing and lead to him passing soon. The medical care switches gears to hospice care. He understands this, and the first thing he says on the phone when the two of you talk is his matter-of-fact, “Wellp, I guess this is the place where I’m at for the rest of my life.” He is in no or very little pain, and over the conversation you both express wonder at how decent he feels when there’s such a final diagnosis looming. He is his usual funny but German-stoic self, and you’re grateful that you have time left with him, however uncertain the amount of time.

A few weeks later, you’re on the plane to Albuquerque. You don’t remember the last time you booked a nonstop back to your hometown, you’re there in an instant and you wonder why you didn’t fly this way all the time. You get in, in the early evening and at the airport you text him: I’m here! He texts back right away, out of character for him. “Welcome!” “Are you feeling up for a visitor?” “No, let’s just see each other tomorrow.” “Love you dad, goodnight.” The Uber drops you off at his house and you put your code into the garage door, which reluctantly grumbles and creaks open.

The minute you enter the living room something’s…off. It’s too quiet, too empty. It takes you a second to register what sound is missing: the soft distant noise of his oxygen machine. In the corner, there’s a brand new card table and chair set up, completely out of place. You go up to it: a pile of mail, notes to you from Jeanne, a couple of things dropped off by neighbors. The card table is purely functional and recent, this is where Dad’s Affairs Will Be Put In Order. You open the fridge. No food, of course the perishables have been thrown out. All that’s left is the Wisconsin cheese curds, more cheese, and some cheese. Oh, and the remnant of a summer sausage. You text your old college buddy Shawn: Too quiet. Need to GTFO of here. Drinks?

You drive Dad’s cranky old Jeep Grand Cherokee across Albuquerque to the University district of town, meet up with Shawn at The Frontier, a greasy spoon diner-style legend. Over burritos and combo plates smothered in green chili, you catch up, tell each other how your years have been going. You run into friends and meet up a bit later at Sidewinders, one of Albuquerque’s two gay bars left (an exaggeration, but only barely). It’s a fun, boozy, distracting first night in your hometown, and drag queens play Jenga while the four of you politely fend off the flattering advances of a stranger whose idea a sexy opening line is slurring How old are you? to each of you in turn.

You wake up groggy and disoriented the next morning. You look at your phone. 9:15 . Oh shit oh fuck you think. On a five day trip to meet your ailing father, waking up hours later than you meant to, is not how you wanted to start the trip when every moment seems like another minute you could be spending with him.

You open the fridge. There is only cheese. You go to Starbucks.

You miss the turnoff to the care facility because of course you do. You make your way back, cursing under your breath, just like your dad does. You find it, park, the sliding doors open and you enter just as the fastest motorized wheelchair you’ve ever fucking seen does a low flyby past you. “Whoa” you manage to mutter as the silver-haired woman in the chair gives a pursed-lip smile to herself and burns rubber around the corner into another hallway.

You enter your dad’s room. He is asleep, but he wakes up shortly after you get there. The two of you chat a bit, you tell him about your flight, he tells you about the food there (they serve him everything pureed, due to his advanced COPD, but it’s actually pretty decent tasting!). You think to yourself, but don’t dare say out loud, Everything is fine! He’s fine! Maybe they made a mistake? He shouldn’t even be here? You notice his overgrown fingernails, go to the front nurse station, request a nail trim.

You go to the house later after watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy with him, where he called out the answers just as quickly and as often as you did. You text your neighbor Jane nervously: Everything okay with Ned? Sorry to be a helicopter mom. Ned, your elderly Russian Blue cat, is entering a new, maybe final phase of his life. Just a week before your trip, he stopped eating for four days in a row, you rushed him to the emergency vet nearby. It was grim news: he probably has cancer. You declined further expensive testing and opted for appetite stimulants and anti-nausea medication. In the week before your trip these seemed to help, he gained weight back, you cradled his feather-light body upside-down against your chest and his purrs grew deeper as he looked into your eyes with his cloudy ones. Go see your dad, he seemed to say. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back. In present day, Jane confirms that he’s been eating more and not throwing up anymore. You breathe a sigh of relief, but you know you’re on borrowed time.

Your dad urged you to take the big bed, the one in the master bedroom, but that’s his bed. You can’t do that, not yet. Maybe not ever. You open the fridge again. Nope just cheese. Oh wait, what’s that at the bottom? You open the vegetable drawer and it’s the motherlode: a drawer full of chocolate and butterscotch pudding cups! You hungrily down a butterscotch one, but this barely takes the edge off. You text your friend Shawn again: let’s grab dinner and drinks!

You wake up the next morning blurry and groggy. You look at your phone. Oh fuck! The piano mover. The huge ancient piano from the 1850’s is being moved to storage, arranged by your mom, who asks you for updates via text every few minutes. She’s in luck though: the piano mover recognizes the instrument. He evaluated it for a tuning years before and has admired it. He and his helper are reverent as they gingerly cart it off to storage. You then load one of the fake Eames chairs into the back of dad’s Grand Cherokee to take to a family friend’s storage. You can’t help but feel like you’re removing memories, disassembling the house lego-style, one brick at a time.

The doorbell rings. It’s Rick, one of the estate sale managers, here to get the mileage off the Jeep in order to prepare it for auction block when it’s time. As you peer into the dash to read the numbers off, you also conversationally tell him about the piano, the chair. He chuckles softly, “Haha, is there going to be anything left for the estate sale?” As you’re heading back into the garage you stop short, turn slowly as you suddenly feel your pulse throb in your ears. “Yes, me and my sibs are uh, minimalists. We’re only taking things we love the most,” you stammer, holding back from adding As if it’s any of your fucking business, asshole. He leaves, and as the garage door closes, you know that he’s just doing his job. Ah fuck you mutter softly as you finally let the tears come for the first time since being home. Why can’t we just turn this house into a Museum Of Dad? Why can’t we just have it forever?

You go in again to see him, spend another day with him. You ask how he slept, he says he had a bad cough the night before so they needed to give him medicine. He slept like a baby after that. You ask if he remembers the name of the medicine.

“Meph, math…morph?”

“…morphine, dad?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Morphine.”

So, you think to yourself, we’ve turned that corner now. You quietly note for the first time, that he is not hooked up to any monitors, there is no beeping, there are no medicines in bags hanging nearby going into his arm. He is just in a bed, being made as comfortable as possible.

Today, instead of asking once again for the resident manicurist to cut his nails, you’ve brought the nail clippers from his house yourself. You take his hand as he looks at you appreciatively, you start cutting his nails. First the right hand, then the left. You are both quiet as you do this. When you’re done, he takes them for a test drive, paws his remote control, then pantomimes texting on his phone. He smiles at you. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry you repeat to yourself in your head, and it works. You close out the day both shouting out the answers at Pat Sajak and Ken Jennings, as dad eats his pureed dinner and you goodnaturedly bully him into finishing everything on his plate (oh how the tables have turned). Later, he falls asleep.

You get up, walk around the room, it’s not a small room, it’s easily big enough for two but he’s the sole occupant. You pick up the pile of photos you had pried out of his albums and brought here. He told you a story about every one of them, there I was as a baby, there’s him and my brother at his high school graduation party. There’s Great Uncle Marty who was in the Coast Guard in WWII. He briefly went through a town in the Black Forest in Germany that was positively silly with Schneiders, many of whom were our ancestors of my great grandfather and great grandmother, who met on the boat they came across on.

You’re interrupted by the faint sound of the ocean. You hear a seagull in the distance, an unknown sound here in landlocked Albuquerque. You peek out the door of the room, you smile as the salty breeze hits your face. You turn to your sleeping dad as he breathes softly, you feel back the thin sheet, revealing his hospital gown. You scoop your arms under his back, under the crook of his legs, you gingerly pick him up, left his weight to your chest. His breath is shallow but steady as he remains asleep. You angle him out of the room without his head, his pale feet hitting the doorframe. You start walking down the hall, towards the ocean lapping at the end of it. The smell of saltwater in the air is strong as you carry him further, and he is light, as light as your cat. Your sneakers start squishing in the wet carpet as you reach the water and you keep walking, the water is up to your ankles, it is up to your knees, it is not cold at all, it is so warm, and you still hold him as the water reaches your waist, your chest, you never let him go.