It is like living in two worlds.

I guess for most people there is some duality... between work life and home life ... real life and vacation life ... school life and between semesters life ... dance life and everything else life ...

For me, there has always been the duality of My Parents' Life and Real Life.

Recently there has been a bifrucation of My Parents' Life. Now, there is Nursing Home Life and non-Nursing Home Life for them. My father lives Nursing Home Life and my mother lives non-Nursing Home Life.

I've intended to write about this for a long time now, but gotten hung up on where to start... It feels like I've been driving up there half of every week forever. Wearing grooves in I-35, miraculously not smashing into the concrete barrier walls too close in to all of us in vehicles screaming north or south at 80 miles an hour in the slow lane and who knows what in the fast lane, too dangerous to look. After 25 years of not driving up there ever, now I'm going every week. And the new Nursing Home Life is another twist on the dysfunctional relationship I have with my parents.

What changed was that they said my father was going to get gangrene in his leg, have it cut off and die from the shock and depression. He was in the hospital at the time. Something about not keeping the ice bag on and yelling at my mother when she put it back. Not enough ice causes gangrene?! OK, I'm not going up there to be a personal slave as they had envisioned for me since birth, but I'm also not going to let my father get gangrene in his leg and have it cut off. A person can't go from mowing the yard and getting gas in the car on Monday to gangrene and getting his foot cut off on Friday. Well, apparently in small Texas towns they can do that, but I wouldn't let that happen to my dog or cat and I'm not going to let that happen to my father.

That's been huge image for my siblings and me these past months... that our dogs have much higher standards of living than our father does.

Daddy was in the nursing home and his ankle and foot were black and hard and ankle, calf and thigh were all the same diameter on that one leg when I got there with my jar of Comfrey Compounded Ointment. I smeared that on, rubbing from the bottom up as my manual lymph drainage massage therapist does for me to reduce inflamation. Once or twice a day, three or four days a week for two weeks. The first few days I couldn't massage the whole leg, too painful, but I did everything on the leg that could stand it, hoping to get the circulation going and also I believe in the comfrey for healing injuries.

I made it on time for the weekly doctor's appointment in week two. The doctor said the leg looked amazingly better and added that he had expected to have to amputate. I said what I'd been doing. He replied well it's probably OK but don't put too much of that on... I said too late, I'd already used up two jars on it. He said I needed to give up thinking my father would recover and be normal.

That was Monday. The preceding Thursday, the physician's assistant, on her weekly visit, told my mother in front of me to just look at it this way. It's a positive thing for his leg to get cut off. If he's in the wheel chair he can't get into trouble as much because he won't be able to reach things. It will be much easier to watch him then. I asked her if we could approach the rehabilitation of his ankle as if he were an athlete... give him physical therapy as if we expected him to recover and be able to play a sport. She told me to get a reality check – there are no geriatric sports doctors.

There's so much. The ground is thick with stories.

After the first Tai Chi class I taught on Daddy's hall, for him and the other folks with fairly significant dementia of various origins, he called me by my name. That was a big deal, since he hadn't been able to do that since he'd been in the nursing home. And each of the past two weeks, a different woman who had previously sat still in her wheelchair, hands in lap, head down, did some hand and arm movements at some point during the class. Such beauty in a hand moving.

He always asks... uh, where's your sister? Have you seen her? You mean my mother. Yes... she's fine. I spent the night there last night. No, she doesn't have any new fella's over there. For one thing, she's 78 years old and for another thing how long do you think you've been in here (about six years at least!) well, it's only been three months... the house is the same, the yard is the same, some of those canna's bloomed you moved from the front yard to the back... it's all the same. ...Whether she wants you or not is none of my business, that's between the two of you, I'm just here to keep you from getting gangrene.

He's gradually been getting more adjusted to being there. Last week when we got to the park, had eaten our picnic lunch and were looking at the water, he said oh I forgot to tell you... We have this lady, who every now and then will come get five or six of us and we all get in this big thing and we go everywhere! We go here and there and here and there (arm motions illustrating the heres and theres) and we do anything we want. And she does it just because she enjoys it! She enjoys it as much as we do! It's really nice.

This week... it's like a mystery novel and I'm wondering what will happen next. One of the demented ladies who is younger than the rest but more demented than many, had missed Tai Chi class but was sitting out in the living room as I was leaving. I stopped to give her a hug and tell her goodbye and Daddy was, of course, following right behind me. I leaned down and said, “Hi Miss Shirley...” and Daddy reached around me, grabbed her hand and said, “This is Shirley! She's my...” He often does that when introducing me and will finally say Sister! or Cousin! And then I have to say no, Daughter... So I was rushing and spoke for him... “...she's your friend.” He said, “Yes, she is!... And I love her!” and he kissed her on the forehead.

Wow, if Daddy could fall in love and be happy in the nursing home, what a miracle that would be!!

I feel so much guilt for not giving up my life to move back in with them so my father could go home. My intellectual self knows that would be a bad idea, but my emotional self feels those same strings pulling that I've worked 25 years to cut.