On one of the days that I am visiting my mother at the hospital, I am watching my parents from a distance, almost as though they are not my parents and I am watching a scenario a bit removed from my life. My mother labors to return from the nether-land of the anaesthesia that put her under for hip surgery and the morphine that followed. My father is at her side, attentive and impatient at a situation on which his presence has no bearing. He struggles to assert that he is the one who makes decisions for them. "She is my wife!" he says stridently.
It is 105 degrees outside and my father is wearing a sweater to the hospital. He removes and puts back on his sweater perhaps 15 times in the hour that he visits my mother. Sometimes he gets the buttons right, other times not. He also gets up from the bedside chair repeatedly to pace. He is calling his handkerchief his sweater.
My mother stirs and half opens her eyes. He leans over her bed to kiss her, asking, "Are you all right?"
Forgetting what happened to him in the fall, she asks tenderly, "Joe, what happened to you? How did you hurt yourself?"
He gives her an unintelligible explanation for what has happened to both of them. She nods, and holding his hand, she slips back into rest.
On a more recent day I am at their house trying to get my father to eat lunch. He unwraps the burger he asked for, dismantles it piece by piece, puts it back together and rewraps it in paper. He will only eat french fries that are short. He has a problem with the long ones.
It is late August and two of my sisters have broached the inevitability that my father's rapid decline may necessitate putting him in a home. The idea strikes to the core of me and recoils in protest. How would we do this to a man who so cared for us? How could we take him from my mother? How would we remove him from what little helps him hold things together?
One way or another those questions answer themselves on a daily basis, but on one of the days that the idea of doing this is new to me, I feel an immense tenderness for all the good, kind things this man did for all of us and for me in particular because I tested his love every way a child can. He put his hands in fire for me, and not just once.
On this day that I am thinking we might send him away, I cannot stop weeping, even when I will myself to do so. The part of me that understands that he needs far more care than we can give him at home races forward to get used to the topic of a rest home. It's a moral wrestle, one that tightens the air in my chest and smashes my heart. One of the justifications Melissa and I exchange is that this isn't really our father, that the disease has claimed him and replaced him with this difficult, sometimes violent-tempered individual who is making our mother's recovery very difficult. "He is gone," we tell ourselves, and for the moment we believe it.
At his house, he motions for me to sit next to him to watch TV. After a few minutes, he reaches over to touch my hand, asking, "Are you all right?" and it is then I understand that my father persists like a dying star.

María Eugenia Guerra