This post was written over the course of several weeks. I am now home in California:

Wednesday June 21st, 2017~ I’m relaxed at this exact moment. I just had a two hour Tok Sen Thai Massage at Siam Sensation. This is my first break in six days since flying to Denver on June 14th to take care of my father post his wife’s death on June 7th. My brother and his partner are spelling me for a few hours. It’s been hellish and hard and I’ve had no time to cry, really. Tears leak out in moments, but the work-load is pretty constant. Caring for a 94-year-old beloved who is in fairly constant emotional and physical pain is a full-time, many person endeavor. My father’s just six weeks from having fallen and broken his hip, then gotten hip replacement surgery, followed by a minor heart attack two days later and being intubated despite his DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order and then having to be in a rehabilitation facility for a month and watch his beloved wife, of the last 18 years, Judy wither away and die. This is the territory I entered when I came to Denver for the second month in the last three. I spent all of April and one week of May here helping with the hospital stay and the transition to the rehabilitation facility.

It’s a week later, once again, getting a respite at the home of my brother, his partner and my daughter. Sitting in the back yard of my childhood home. My father gave my brother and his partner this home when he moved to Denver to be with Judy. This was where I spent half of every week as a child. It’s more lovely than it ever was when I was growing up. My daughter has filled the downstairs with the art of my grandmother, her great-grandmother Perla Barchilon, her grandmother/my mother Helen Redman, and her other grandmothers’ (Maren Frank and Rachel Heller’s) art is also all over, as is my brother Paul Barchilon’s and also my daughter’s own art. The place is clean and colorful and not-cluttered. It feels like home in a completely different way than it did as a child. My brother and his partner also live upstairs in the home they designed and it is completely fantastic as well and full of art, beauty and calm.

Is this  where we should move my father? Should he go into an Assisted Living/Nursing home, a thought that initially made him cringe (since starting this article my brother and his partner looked at many homes and found two that are within budget, barely and that my father also didn’t hate). We cannot afford full-time care-giving for him at his place through an agency. We cannot afford over-night care for him either through the agencies that provide that. With his funds, possibly a few hours a day could be managed, but that’s not going to cut it, in my opinion. Furthermore, he hasn’t been alone since March 30th when he fell and broke his hip. We are most likely, at this point, hiring someone to care-give outside of an agency, which is half the cost, which is pricey, but within his budget and allows him to live at home, which is what he wants. My brother will have to manage all of this and we will vet the person and make sure their police-records are checked, but it’s not the same as a family member.

My tears are still intermittent. The reality is that my father cannot live on his own, not yet, perhaps not ever. Despite two months of my time and life and the practically constant care and presence of my brother over the last six months, my father is not healed enough to live on his own. Both my sons have flown out to help for a week each and my daughter is also a regular presence in his life and home now. My Papa thinks he wants to be independent and on his own in his own home, but he’s had the loving and devoted presence of his wife in that apartment and since her death, he has had a steady stream of loving family. This will no longer be the case. There are kind and devoted folks in his building that care about him, but they cannot care-give him or be there in any kind of medically responsible way. He doesn’t want to live with my daughter in her study, which we would convert to a bedroom. He doesn’t want to live anywhere but his own home, who can blame him for that?

I haven’t had the energy to see any of my friends while I’ve been here. I cannot even make phone calls or emails much. The schedule at night has been my father needing help every two hours or so, with blankets, incontinence issues, pain management, difficulty breathing, thirst, etc… So, I’ve been in a pretty constant state of sleep deprivation, with nights off once a week or so on Shabbat if we pay the $300 it costs for one night’s care for him or when it has worked for my brother or my daughter to spend the night. Obviously not a sustainable situation.

And I’m not even touching the sadness here, the pain of my father’s loneliness sitting at the table while I do the dishes or the cooking and he looks out the window missing his wife with every fiber of his frail body and incredibly clear and cogent mind. He told my son Issac and I, while explaining that he was going to speak to us as if we weren’t in the room so he could say what was on his mind, “I pretend she is on a trip or out doing errands and this lasts for a few hours and then I remember that she’s never coming home.” There were tears streaming down his face while he shared this.

This situation is so damn hard.

And, my daughter said the other night, it’s not even bad really, because we are all loving with him and each other and he isn’t destitute (he taught French at CU Boulder for 45 years and has a good pension). He has options and we will figure out how to navigate all of this, with the capable minds and bodies of my daughter, my brother and his partner here in Boulder and myself and my family here in California. In the long-run, this story is a love-story, a family caring for each other and the person most in need with kindness, effort, intelligence and profound love. Whatever difficulties have been in my past with my father or in my brother’s past; my papa had a temper and he has never approved of my spiritual calling or my emotional nature (he thinks I should have been a lawyer!). Still, he has always loved us, gifted us with his time and caring, and been there for us in BIG ways. It’s our turn now.