February 2 is a particularly significant date to me because it was on February 2, 2000 that I brought my Dad home from the nursing home. After he had hip replacement surgery on his right hip, he stayed in a nursing home for three months, and he was extremely unhappy. He was eighty-eight and, since he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, most of the time he didn't know where he was or why he was there.

While he was in the nursing home, I would visit him three times a day, every day: in the morning before work, on my lunch hour, and after work. Even so, many days he would telephone me from the nurses' station, and tell me that he was somewhere on a street corner and that he needed a ride home. I would reassure him that I knew where he was and that I would see him soon. He always seemed so relieved to see me, as if the staff didn't understand that he needed to go home. I would stay with him as long as I could and, then, tuck him in for the night before I would leave.

Before my Dad could come home from the nursing home, my Mom had to hire someone to stay with them while I was at work. She put an ad in the local newspaper and interviewed several people. Before she hired one, I brought my Dad home for several weekend visits from the nursing home. Finally, the big day, February 2, 2000, came! He was so glad to be home. My parents were married in 1940 and, until he went to the nursing home, they had probably not been apart more than a handful of days.

It took us a while to work out a routine, because, even after the surgery and physical therapy, my Dad couldn't get around as well as he could before he broke his hip, but he was happy, because he was at home, and that made all the difference.

On Wednesday, February 7, 2001, my Dad fell again. This time his left hip broke. On Friday, February 9, he underwent hip replacement surgery for the second time, but things did not go as well as they did the first time. He experienced a heart attack on the operating table. He survived the heart attack, only to die in his sleep, on Wednesday, February 28, two months to the day before his ninetieth birthday.

The last time that I saw him alive, the night before he died, he asked me to tell my Mom, "Hello." He asked me to tell her, his sweetheart of sixty years, that he loved her. He was a remarkable man. I sure do miss him.