to pack his lunch.
We were cruising toward that “empty nest” phase with something like relief.
And then there’s my mother.
Mom is 82. Mentally, she’s sharp enough to slice you in half with one well-placed comment, but her body is falling apart on her. In January, she slipped in her kitchen, fell, and fractured her hip.
Suddenly, the fiercely independent woman who used to mow her own lawn was stuck in a recliner counting pain pills.
My father died at 73 of a sudden stroke. One minute he was arguing with me about whether I graded too harshly; the next he was gone. He’d worked hard his whole life and left Mom more than comfortable—farmland, stocks, the house they’d lived in for 40 years.
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