The nursing home van arrives

The van arrives and drives my dad to his new home. While I pack his things and wander through the house that he and my mother have lived in for nearly 30 years, I did not expect that packing my father’s belongings would cause me to feel that my mother was even more gone, if an already dead person can seem more gone, she did. Packing his things and knowing what clothes she wanted me to send and which shirts were not in good enough shape, and seeing their years in the house in the pictures of their grandchildren, in the stick pins stuck all over the big United States map showing all the places my dad had hauled farm machinery from East Coast to West Coast made the end of their lives together, the end of an era all the more visible and painful to me. This is like dropping your child off for kindergarten, but instead of the beginning of a new adventure, the nursing home is the beginning of an end.  Change is the one thing that can be counted on always.