Our first vacation in a year started out pleasantly enough: easy flight to M’waukee; smooth drive to Indiana, with barely any slowdown around Chicago; and a surprisingly good dinner in Valparaiso. (After little food all day, I was hungry for something fast and cheap and bad for me, but D. wanted to try a locally owned home-cookin’ type of establishment. I vetoed the one he chose, which featured chop some questionable-sounding evening specials (chop suey, cabbage rolls) on a dry-erase board in front. We settled on Kelsey’s Irish Pub Steak and Seafood, hoping that whatever seafood they offered wouldn’t be fried in tallow. We hit the place [which had nothing even remotely Celtic going for it, by the way] during the Early Bird dinner peak, which turned out to be extremely cheap and tasty. We felt sorry for the waitresses, though: despite trying to tempt diners to splurge on extras like onion ring tower appetizers, apple martinis, and triple-chocolate cheesecake, no one felt the need to augment their $7.95 feasts.)

We pulled into Warsaw around 7:15 p.m. to find my mom visibly shaken. She’d gotten home late from work to find that my dad had fallen and was unable to right himself without her help. He was asleep when we got there; my mom described a nasty rug burn, bruises, and pretty bad swelling in one knee.

Some backstory: 13 years ago, my dad left his job designing replacement hips and knees for a large orthopedics firm to work for a small startup. He wasn’t there a month before he was laid off, and he soon found that companies weren’t too keen on hiring a mechanical engineer in his early 50s. For at least 10 years, his knees have increasingly deteriorated to the point where he now needs two canes to lurch around the house, uses the electric shopping carts at the grocery store, can’t drive, and lives in the kind of pain I can’t begin to comprehend. He’d hoped to have some financial assistance from Medicare when he reached the magic age, but because his arthritis is a preexisting condition, surprise! The $100,000 knee-replacement surgery he needs isn’t covered.

As if the irony of my father’s inability to benefit from the prosthetics he helped design weren’t enough: while we were in Indiana, D’s mom was recovering from her first knee-replacement surgery and scheduled for her second a week later. She is doing great and says that the pain she feels post-surgery, while not minor, is noticeably less than what she suffered before the surgery.

During the course of our visit, my dad’s leg injury worsened. Diabetics are slow to heal anyway, but he had dark streaks radiating from his bruised leg that looked an awful lot like blood poisoning. My father refused to be taken to a doctor; my mom was able to get some penicillin and Tylenol 3, which seemed to help somewhat. You want to experience some conflicting emotions? Try taking a drive with your mother to her office after hours, watch her estimate how many days’ worth of antibiotics your dad will need, and hear her say, “I’d do anything for that man, even steal drugs for him.”

Compounding an already troubling situation is my brother’s seeming indifference to his parents. I don’t think he has any idea how badly my dad is doing, but he hasn’t asked, either. He hasn’t visited our parents in eight years, although he’s made at least one trip to Chicago with his family during that time. My mom started crying when she told me that she feels as if he’s pushed them out of his life, and that she’ll never really know her granddaughter. (No pressure on me to produce another, more accessible grandchild; that is, if you count her “It’s all up to you, kiddo” as pressure-free.)

At this point, I don’t know what’s going to happen. My mom had given notice to her boss that she wanted to retire in December, but it’s not unlikely that she’ll quit sooner to take care of my dad. She and I had some difficult conversations, including one where she confided that she thinks my dad’s health is declining at an increasing rate and that she knows he’s pretty seriously depressed; she doesn’t think he has much time left, although since he won’t go back to his doctor, I have no idea whether her estimate is accurate or just indicative of her worst fear. I’m pretty sure that my dad’s won’t pay for the surgery he so desperately needs because he doesn’t want to diminish the savings my mom will live on once he’s gone.

D was amazingly supportive and understanding, despite the various traumas I dragged him into. Besides comforting me each time I lost it, he spent hours cleaning spyware from my parents’ computer and showing my mom how to use Firefox, helped reorganize their garden shed, and picked up a used wheelchair for my dad and returned it after we found that it wasn’t the right size. What’s more, he and my dad got to know each other better on this visit, and my mom told me almost daily how much she likes my boy.

Next time: some of the more pleasant parts of our trip, and maybe the Fallacious Index.