I was with my father, then 92, in southern California, where he and my mother had come to escape Chicago’s brutal winter. But it had proved more difficult than he had imagined: being in a strange house, with an unfamiliar routine, and new people around, including nephews and nieces whose names he no longer remembered. It was exhausting, and he was sleeping 16 hours a day, nodding off during breakfast, in the middle of a conversation, or next to the Pacific Ocean, with pelicans flying over his oblivious head.

One day in La Jolla, as we were leaving an oceanside park, he stood up from the bench where he had been snoozing and announced that his legs wouldn’t move. My two siblings and I panicked, rushed to hold him up on either side, as we slowly made our way to our rental car. He managed to shuffle along, as I helped support him on one side. As we got to the car, he looked at me: “Kathy, someday you’ll be an old woman.”