The day we moved my father into the place in Paramus, I sat in the parking lot for forty minutes before I could drive home.

He did not fight it. That was somehow worse. He said okay son, and started folding his sweaters, and he folded them the way my mother used to fold them.

For a long time I treated the guilt as evidence. As though feeling it that strongly proved I had done something wrong.

It is not evidence. It is what it feels like to love someone and not be able to be there at three in the morning when they need the bathroom. Every person I have met in that parking lot felt it, and nearly every one of them had made a reasonable decision.

He has been there fourteen months. He has a friend called Walter and they argue about baseball. I go Sundays, I stay about two hours, and we are both all right. I still think about the sweaters.

If you are sitting in a parking lot somewhere: you are not the first, and it does not stay this heavy.