The cats will play

These days are filled with an unutterable sadness, as we all watch my dad deteriorate, slowly but surely. The end cannot come soon enough for him, and we are impotent bystanders at the site of a fatal collision between his will and Death's, which has no known deadline and is taking its sovereign time.

Although it is summer, and the days are longer, they seem short and filled with anxious nothings that sometimes turn into significant somethings when my dad tells a story or expresses a feeling or recalls a loving memory. I don't want to miss any of those snapshots that come few and far between the times when he is asleep or silent.

The best I can do, I know, is to be a devotedly loving daughter, who lets him know on a daily basis how much we love him and helps him move on to that light they say expects all of us on the other side, where our beloved departed also await.

Today, I told him that I read somewhere that ghosts can ride on the wings of birds and he liked that story very much. "I hope so," he said with a dreamy look in his eyes.

Meanwhile, we try to find joy in every little thing and, of course, Darwin is almost always (except when he decided to yowl at around 4 a.m. recently and my dad complained that "The cat is sounding," as if he was talking about an alarm) a source of, at the very least, a smile. Especially when he does his Superman pose, which I also say is him cooling off his private parts during these hot summer days.

Hamlet, on the other hand, is almost invariably a pest, meowing and yowling almost constantly for several hours each and every day. Now that my father is sleeping in our reading area, which is open, he can hear every sound and noise throughout the house, so Hamlet's constant meowing becomes not just an annoyance but an actual problem.

I think Hamlet, who ran away from home twice through a poorly secured screen while we were in Concord, got a taste of Paris and doesn't want to stay in the farm anymore, as my husband likes to say. Thus, today I gave him some outdoor time, which he really enjoyed (to poor Darwin's chagrin) but we had to bring him inside once he figured out how to get to the front of the house. Pain in the butt as he is, I would be devastated if, moron that he is, too, he gets run over by some car driving too fast on the road in front of our house.

During the times I am able to, I continue to work, and really enjoy making a dent, on my summer research schedule, which includes substantially revising one article for a journal that suggested I revise and resubmit, and revising a second one for submission to another journal. I also am working on a third essay proposal for a special issue due by summer's end, and awaiting news about a chapter proposal that I submitted before the semester was over. I also would like to expand my Concord paper into a full essay to be submitted to another journal but that may have to wait until fall semester.

I've also started on my third-year pre-tenure review prospectus and am considering applying to a major summer fellowship for 2011 to continue working on my book proposal. All these projects are, to one degree or another, exciting to me and are ways in which I can honor my dad by becoming the scholar that he claims I already am.

In the meantime, thank God for the little mercies that come along each day to lighten up this sad, sad time in our lives.