“Come out, Dad.
It’s okay.” The truth that haunts my mother is that she is going to take him away. She has a plan she’s been hiding from him. And telling him that he has to leave his home is perhaps the most difficult thing she’s ever done. My parents are unable to care for my grandparents. On top of my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, my grandmother has congestive heart failure, chronic lung disease, and dementia. What they share is a fear of leaving the life they have built amid the walls of the home they have lived in for more than sixty years. In an effort to help them, my mother hired a home-health aid, a nursing student who made pancakes for breakfast and drove my grandparents around town, but my grandmother let her go. Fiercely independent even as her body fails her, my grandmother told the aid they would be okay. Every time my mother visits, it becomes obvious they aren't. They have difficulty getting dressed. He forgets to eat. She doesn’t take her medicines. Some days are more dire than others. Every now and then, my grandfather mistakenly turns off the twenty-four-hour oxygen tank my grandmother uses to breathe because it’s making noise. Just out of the hospital a few weeks ago, my grand-
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mother struck a deal with my mother: She would go to a nursing home if my grandparents could stay together. But the reality is, my grandparents can’t afford to stay together—and my parents can’t afford their request, either. Estimates from nursing homes are up to $12,000 a month for their collective care. My grandparents, who owned a gas station and worked in a sock mill, saved pennies for the first and only home they owned but not for a life event like this. Selling their home would barely pay half of their nursing home costs for a year. The one flicker of hope has come through a Department of Veterans Affairs benefit afforded my grandfather because he was a medic during the Korean War. His pension would cover some of the costs of his care at a respectable state veteran’s home. My grandmother would have to go to a home somewhere else, however, because civilian spouses typically aren’t admitted. My mother has come to accept that finding my grandparents separate nursing homes is the best way she can care for them. She wrestled with the decision for many months, knowing their closeness. They share the same birthday, five