(I watch you get older, and I’m powerless to stop it. Your life, which begat mine, fades, and another home for me is gone. The place where I went is gone, and now the place where I came from is going.)
"He’s still up there, your Grampa is."
A nod up the hill on the south end of town, near the new elementary school.
"They’re pretty nice there."
They are, I quickly learn when I visit him.
(We develop these relationships with caregivers - until strangers we don’t know, and wouldn’t, except for the misfortune of injury and ill-health, and the inevitability of age - become friends. Or if not friends, at least familiar faces and voices who occupy the same frame as our familial concern, just at different times. They care in ways we don’t, or can’t. A glance, a smile, tired and maybe empathetic. It’s a job, the easy part. The hard part is for us.)
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