Thursday morning means soft boiled eggs for breakfast.  That may be the only thing for certain today – well, that and going to chemo at 11:30.   Dad has been up for quite a while already, unloading the dishwasher, getting breakfast ready, feeding his sour dough bread starter, making sure he has everything he needs for dinner tonight, patiently waiting for mom to wake up.

He’s learning how to cook all over again – gluten free at that. The sourdough bread is for him, but he as spent hours perfecting a gluten free bread for her; purchasing no fewer that 5 gluten free cookbooks, researching consumer reports recommendations on gluten free flour mixes.  He’s a chemist after all, that’s what he does – researches and experiments.  It was my mother who always cooked.

The above section was written in September 2014.  That was as far as I got that day.  Now it’s 2026 … and I have no idea how the rest of that day would have gone.  Except that I know my dad continued to look after every need my mom had.  Eventually mom decided that chemo was no longer beneficial for her so she stopped treatments and entered hospice care.  April 15, 2015, he woke up in the morning and she had died sometime in the night.  Now 11 years later and he’s living in a senior living community, independent living – the place he and my mother thought they would move into together.

I still live too far away in the Midwest.  I’m visiting for his 91st birthday and he asked me what I wanted for breakfast this morning.  He said he rotates between scrambled eggs, his own smoothie recipe, oatmeal and sometimes just toast.  But always, milk, coffee, oj and his many, many vitamins.  That has been a part of his world since I can remember.

At 91 his world involves too many goodbyes.  His good friends are dying.  I have to imagine it gets harder and harder to find the motivation to expend the energy to invest in new friends.  The shared history of family, children, grandchildren, niblings, becomes even more important for grounding and connection.  For me the same number of miles seem to expand somehow and make the distance greater.  My sister may be deciding to stay closer for the next few years.  We both want to be a part of my father’s world.