Letting go

As his disease progresses, it gets more dangerous to have him at home. We don’t want to stick him in some dirty, piss smelling nursing home. We don’t want someone else giving him his medicine and getting annoyed with the same story he has told 20 times. That’s why we’re here, to take care of him. But now, we have come to an impasse. It’s not safe. I think that's going to be the biggest struggle of all. Letting go.

I walked into the kitchen one morning and he was standing by the cupboard where the coffee mugs are. He always has a cup of coffee and a honey bun in the morning with his paper.

On the front right-hand eye of the stove was a cookie sheet with a cup of coffee sitting in the middle of it. The stove eye was on low. He was heating his coffee up, even though the microwave was directly above him.

That’s the day I took the knobs off of the stove and put them in a jar, on the top shelf, next to the  scissors and knives that we had to put away a month earlier after finding a letter opener/knife stuck down in his sock “for protection”.