The Year of Nostalgia

I

Nin found Dad frozen in the backyard. He wasn't trimming the hedges, just standing with his clippers in hand, staring at the bushes, she told me. Who knew how long he'd been like that, his body shivering. She'd put her hand on his back and guided him inside, where she made him a cup of tea.

"You need to come home, Leah," she said. So I asked for another week off, got a reluctant yes, and headed back to Ohio.

Our parents had done everything together, from puttering around the house to working in the garden. Dad would rake leaves, Mom would prepare lunch, and they'd sit in the living room in the late afternoon, reading e-books together. At night they'd stream a movie or go into town for dinner. They were that rare and beautiful couple, almost nonexistent nowadays, lifelong companions and best friends. Then, suddenly, there was only Dad, calling to tell us Mom was gone, making funeral arrangements without us, stern-faced through the service, telling everyone he was fine, just fine.

I'd tried to help during the funeral—I cooked, cleaned the house, washed dishes, had planned to stay an extra week—but Dad pushed Nin and me away. Everything was fine, he told us, we girls should head home, no use staying at the house when we had our own lives to live. And after two days, he said we needed to go. What could we do? Nin left, driving the three hours back to her apartment in Toledo, and I flew back to Boulder, where Theo and the kids were waiting. Two weeks later, Nin called to tell me about finding Dad by the bushes.

Nin picked me up from the airport. Besides the funeral, the last time we'd been home together was when I was finishing my grad degree and she was completing her freshman year as an undergrad. We'd argued about something dumb—an anthropology course she hated—I'd called her narrow-minded and she'd called me a patronizing bitch. After that we hadn't spoken for years. I was hoping grief might help us mend the distance, but when she picked me up, she was being her annoying self, asking me about my flight while simultaneously flicking her eyes to send texts in her contacts as she drove.

"Uh-huh," she commented when I told her how the kids were doing, and laughed suddenly at a video in the corner of her eye. So, instead of continuing, I sat in the passenger seat hating how ADHD her generation was.

"If Dad's got dementia," she said, "you're going to have to move home. I can't handle this alone."

"He's just grieving," I said. I couldn't imagine uprooting everything and moving back to the Mid-west. We had our jobs, the kids' school, never mind living in suburban Ohio, a place Nin might be able to survive but not a place I wanted to return to.

The house was a mess. Dad had let dishes pile up over the past weeks on tables, countertops, and bookshelves. Piles of laundry lay wherever he'd decided to get undressed. I ran the washing machine, scrubbed dishes, and mopped the floors while Dad told us he didn't need our help. Later that evening, we found him in the basement, standing by the water heater for some reason only he understood. I led him back upstairs and got him in bed while Nin mixed us drinks from a bottle of gin she'd found in the pantry. We sat at the kitchen table, exhausted. I scrolled through my eye-screens looking for advice about Dad while Nin played a dumb game on her retinas.

"What about Nostalgia?" I asked.

"That app came and went in the twenties," Nin said.

"Not according to this."

I blinked the article to her and she scanned it without stopping her game. "Whoa," she mumbled. "I had no clue old people were using it." She blinked me a hyperlink from the comment section, and...