Feline Warrior

I’ve mentioned that my father is in a nursing home. When I join my spouse in our new house in our new state, I will also be taking my father along with me, and he’ll be in a nursing home very near to the house. We visited the new nursing home last weekend and it makes the current one (in WV) look like a dump.

In any case, I was thinking back to the summer of 2004… the summer before my father had the debilitating stroke. He’d just had a corneal transplant and I was visiting for the weekend. One evening, as he sat in his chair and I sat on the floor trying to organize his files, I asked if we could talk about “what if’s.” A discussion about what he wanted me to do if he had another stroke and was unable to care for himself (and at that time, he was getting closer & closer to not being able to care for himself, simply because of his diminishing health). He sat up stiffly and suddenly and cried, “You want to put me in a nursing home!” -and of course nothing could be further from the truth.

And yet… there he is: in a nursing home. And it’s likely that he’ll end his days in one, whether it’s in West Virginia or in Ohio. Broke in many ways - financially, physically, and certainly spiritually.

This is something that I cannot fix.

U.S. Military Deaths Reach 2,000 in Iraq - Yahoo! News

Favorite quotes:

Our armed forces are serving ably in Iraq under enormously difficult circumstances, and the policy of our government must be worthy of their sacrifice. Unfortunately, it is not, and the American people know it,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), the Massachusetts Democrat.
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Sen. Robert Byrd (news, bio, voting record), a veteran Democrat from West Virginia, said Americans should expect “many more losses to come.”
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“More than 135,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq. They did not ask to be sent to war, but each day, they carry out their duty while risking their lives. It is only reasonable that the American people, and their elected representatives, ask more questions about what the future holds in Iraq,” Byrd said.