After dinner one night, my mother had been going about her usual routine of sorting laundry in the basement and hanging my dad’s shirts to dry.
As she took the first couple of steps up the basement stairs, she was struck by an aneurysm and fell backwards. A couple of hours later, my dad found her unconscious on the basement floor. He called the paramedics, and then me.
There was nothing they could do for her. They took her off life support after a long night in the ICU. My daughter and I kept vigil on the floor all through that night at the foot of her bed.
The next morning, I returned to the house with my dad. The living room was like a shadowbox of my mother’s last moments. The lamp on the end table was still on. A soft pink throw blanket lay casually on the couch where she had left it to go down to the basement. Her Kindle sat on the glass-top coffee table next to the couch. Inside its cover were handwritten notes on yellow Post-Its with names of the characters and settings of the book she’d been reading — The Secret Wife by Gill Paul.
At the time my dad took care of settling my mother’s estate, essentially shielding my brother and me from all of the paperwork and pain of closing out a person’s life.
Years later, my father died awaiting back surgery. He and his primary doctor had been working to get the date moved sooner because he was in so much pain.
Ironically, just a few hours after he died, the surgeon’s office called to say they were able to move up his surgery date.
My dad lived until his late 80s. I used to joke with him that he would outlive us all.
I think he kind of took that to heart. And I believed it too, after battling cancer and then severe osteoarthritis that put me in a wheelchair and required major surgery to walk again.
Like my mom, my dad left things behind. Amazon orders he’d placed a just day or two before his death, calendar reminders for his weekly bridge games that pop up on his phone that I am monitoring.
The hardest thing for me right now is seeing Google Photos Memories notifications on that phone.
Just yesterday it was a video he took of his Christmas tree from 2025, and the model train he had placed around its base. Holiday music was playing on his old stereo in the background. He was so proud of his train collection and wanted so much to share it with my grandsons.
And yet the video was painful and lonely to me. Because this past Christmas my daughter and grandsons and I were not able to go up to his house to celebrate or to enjoy the tree or the train. We had to host at my condo here instead.
We did go up to spend Easter with him, and my grandsons got to see his Christmas train layout in the basement. He kept it that way for them. And he had filled one of the train cars with jelly beans for them.
These little things meant everything to him.
I am now helping to settle his estate. I am facing all the things he faced several years ago closing out my mother’s life. I’m humbled that he entrusted me with this process because there is so much to it.
He and I didn’t always get along, though I really tried not to argue with him in recent years, especially after my mother died.
My parents took good care of my brother and me. I owe them so much that I will never be able to repay.