Another barks commands from a battlefield. There are the groans, and the kind of drowning coughs that turn the ordinary act of breathing into an extraordinary one. Dad, who is 83, views his life as one of incarceration but that isn't my view, of course. He's had a stroke, he's got two kinds of cancer and a heart that's only beating out of habit. He is, literally, falling apart, his skin falling off in patches.
Skin is supposed to keep the inside, well, in, but nothing is for keeps where the body is concerned.
And there's nothing like spending three months in a rest home to reinforce that notion. I flew to New Zealand one sunny Saturday after hearing him slurring his words in that tell-tale way over the telephone. His last place of residence. Last cupboard, last bed. It was only last May that he lived in a five-bedroom house, now he's down to a suitcase.