One of the biggest struggles I’ve faced in recent weeks with us moving is my dad being ill.

To be fair, it was his encouragement to not wait that helped us move up our original timeline, but still…

Add to that the fact that my mother and I had made steps to heal our fractured relationship, and it’s been a tug-of-war on my heart.

Then one day the call I’d dreaded came, or so I thought.

My mom called from the hospital.

My head and heart spun with the possibilities of what on earth could have happened to dad…

But it wasn’t him.

It was HER.

The “healthy” one of the two.  She has some ailments, to be sure…but my dad is the one that’s truly ailing.

So when your healthy parent goes in to the ER with chest pains, and has to follow it up with a heart cath.

Everything goes upside on you.

Then you have two parents to take care of.

The “healthy” one isn’t as healthy as you thought.

Who do you check on first? Who do you keep an eye on, and who watches who?

One’s issues are expected, almost commonplace now – but now new panic and worries arise.

And you have to struggle with how to deal with all of that – especially with a parent that doesn’t like to be a bother.

Than, you get the call that you have a job and you’re moving in a month.

While I know they’ve got plenty of help here what with my brother and aunt living close by…it’s still rough to have gotten this job and be moving so quickly after this sort of chaos.

In so many ways I’m still struggling to make sense of my dad’s illness – and I’ve known about it for almost 15 years.

It’s hard to think that I’ll be so far away. That I’ll need to keep an emergency flight fund on hand at all times…and now not just for him, but for mom too because we still don’t know what happened or why she ended up in the ER (the heart cath came up clean, thank goodness).

It’s put a damper on our course.

It’s added anxiety to a relationship that was just starting to mend.

I feel a strong sense of guilt leaving…even though I know this is the right path for us.

I suppose now, more than ever, I’m feeling what my mom felt almost 30 years ago when she had to pack up her family and leave Buffalo to move out here to Hickville.

I knew I was leaving one sick parent…now I worry about them both.

I always thought Mom could survive on pure stubbornness alone.

Apparently not even she’s that good.