I did. She understood. The way she phrased it was that he forces me to keep being in an adversarial role toward him. She acknowleged that the care he gets from me is better than what he would receive were he placed in a facility. She said she believes he would rather stay home with me, but she knows he also wants to just do only what he feels like doing and be left alone. She said she knows that, if I aquiesced to his demands, he would sit in filth and develop disgusting sores. I know that he gets regularly showered and given other necessary personal care, only because I bully him into it. Maybe I don't have a right to do that. I treat him like a child that I've adopted, but he's not my child. His family offered to arrange for me to be his legal guardian. I declined.

Despite the bullying, there are sizable hunks of every day that he spends in what looks like a very contented state of mind. By and large, I would say that he is happier mentally and more comfortable physically - by a long shot - than most of the folks languishing in nursing homes, especially the kind that the non-wealthy go into. The evening is our happy time together. Supper is my high point of the day, when I have my nightly glass of wine. He loves television in the evening, eating desert and having coffee, watching an old movie or a nature show together with me. He crawls into a clean, cozy bed at night looking, for all the world, like a man having a very blessed end of life existance . . . and always wants a kiss before he closes his eyes. Last year, at the nursing home, I would see urine stains on the sheets of his bed there. Of course, I'ld remedy that. But the place revulsed me. He says he never, ever wants to go back there. Neither do I.

I think I will do nothing now. Maybe watch something on TV, like a film from the Internet. What seems, now, like a choice between intolerable alternatives won't eventually seem that. Crises have a way of blowing over. They resolve one way, or another. And life goes on . . . sometimes in a different direction. Maybe something will happen that I can't now anticipate that will carry me in the direction I need to go. I guess that's always the fond, sustaining hope of those who live wretched lives.