If and When

On the steamy July afternoon that would soon change our lives, my husband and I were joyously dragging fallen branches down the steep hill below our North Carolina mountain cottage. Joyously, because never mind the sweaty work, we had finally arrived here, just the two of us, in the place we loved most. A year had passed since we’d begun caring for my parents, and we’d had few chances to get away for more than a day or two at a time. Thus the weedy paths in the overgrown gardens, the empty bird feeders, the broken branches and scattered yard debris. A recent lightning storm had cracked the hemlock down the middle and brought down two of the younger pines, but our cottage and decks had been spared.

So, yes, we were feeling lucky that July afternoon. And with each branch I dragged to the edge of the woods, each scrape of the rake, each gravel pathway I cleared, I was freeing a space where my mind could settle, calm. Sweeping it clear of the worry I’d carried since we’d headed out the driveway that morning, waving goodbye to my father, who stood on the porch looking so lost that I’d begun to weep. “Let it go,” Donald had said. “They’ll be fine. This is our week.”

Of course Donald was right; he is almost always right. What did I have to worry about? My siblings would be watching over Mother and Dad day and night. And a few hours away in South Carolina, Donald’s sister was staying with their father until her teaching year started up in a few weeks. Our time in the mountains belonged only to us. Though our cottage is barely two hours from the city, on that July day, without cell phone or internet service on our rural road, the landline was our only connection to the outside world.

We’d kept the phone in case of an emergency, which we’d never experienced in the thirty-five years we’d owned the cottage. Apart from a yellow jacket attack that once sent me, red and swollen, to a nearby clinic, nothing bad had ever happened there. I often imagined, and still imagine, that the cottage is where I will choose to spend my last days. Assuming I am able to choose. Assuming I know when my last days will be. “If I die,” I often say to Donald, spinning out my plan. Or, “If something happens to you . . .” As if if is how nature works things out. When it comes to the end of our days, it is never a question of if. It is a question of when.

But that day, with the sun flickering in and out of the tall pines, I wasn’t thinking of if or when. I was dragging limbs, feeling the sweat trickle down the back of my shirt, and watching three crows swerve in for a landing beside my neighbor’s bird feeder. I could feel my mind emptying, my lungs filling: empty, fill, empty, fill. The week stretched gloriously before us. We could work in the yard, hike the gorge trail, or stretch out on the deck chairs and watch the sun lose itself behind a stand of trees. What a luxury—to know that someone else was keeping watch, calming my father’s night terrors or my mother’s sudden cries that people were looking into the window (“Right there,” she’d insist, pointing to the heavily curtained window in their second-story bedroom. “Can’t you see them?”). And if either of them “went down” again— their term for the numerous slips and falls that had landed us in the urgent care clinic that past year—someone else would handle it. With all three living parents safe and accounted for, we could sleep without worry.

Not that we worried much about Donald’s father, even when he was alone. Despite his advanced age—nearing ninety-eight that summer—he was fiercely independent and physically strong from his decades in the forest service. Unlike my parents, who suffered multiple...