Your dad is very tired

Since I was a child, my mother has in large part communicated on behalf of my father, who usually prefers silence; when he does speak up, it is usually to disastrous effect, so it had always occurred to us that this was the best way. My father has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) from thirty-years of smoking a pack or more of cigarettes a day, and is too weak for most things. A trip to the toilet will wind him for the afternoon. Plans to go to a restaurant invariably end with me bringing food from one of his favorite Thai restaurants. The frazzled trips are worth it for me, so that my kids may have a chance to remember him, and for him to have access to his grandsons, his favorite people in the world, in these later stages of his life. Everyone seems to be happy, even my mother, who briefly forgets to worry if the frozen dumplings thawed too much in the car, as we witness the rarest of sights. My father smiling.