Pulling into Norton’s Audubon Hospital to decide whether palliative care or stoke rehab is the best option for my Dad, I notice there is a new parking garage on top of where the old lot used to sit, and I think back to five years ago when my recurrent trips to this parking lot began.

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I stumble out of the hospital in the morning, after my seventh night of sleeping in a hospital bed next to Dad. The first couple of nights I slept on two folding chairs, then they offered me the hospital bed next to Dad because they had discovered he was too ornery to have a roommate.  Lucky to doze off for an hour a night, I lay there on edge listening to any move Dad makes, worried that he is going to try to get up and injure his newly fractured back.  Everyone is telling me to take care of myself, but I now I have to go and pack up my Dad’s law office, a twelve-room maze of forty-year old files that have never been organized or culled. 

As I plop into the captain’s chair of Dad’s beat up van, I grip the sticky steering wheel and smile in a deep breath, having made it through another night.  I throw it in reverse and start backing out.  In the rearview, I notice an old-school Buick backing up through the parking lot toward me in slow motion.  I surely have time to throw the car in drive and pull forward, but instead, I just honk a few times and watch as the car continues, over what feels like minutes, to inch closer.  Finally, the inevitable happens and I hop out ready to chastise this idiot.

I look at the van’s dented bumper and think this might be the way I can get the rest of my Dad’s existing bumper damages repaired. 

A spry old man hops out, leaving his wife in the passenger seat.  He shrugs and says whaddya say we both just handle our own situation.  Normally, the rabid attorney I inherited from my Dad would erupt from me and demand justice, but his suggestion feels so good, so easy.  I agree. 

He opens his arms and takes me in for a big bear hug.  I manage to hold off the eruption of tears until I get back in the driver’s seat.