It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your --

--wait a minute. That doesn't make sense.

It is 11 o'clock. 11:57 to be exact. And I would give just about anything to be asleep right now but that is not the case. So, I blog.

(When did "blog" become a verb? Odd.)

Every now and then I go back and re-read my blog entries. I don't know if that makes me weird or not. Sometimes I cringe, most times I wonder why anyone would bother reading them in the first place.

Tonight I read back through the first of the year, when Dad started to fail so quickly, and I can't believe that it's over. I remember feeling at the time that it would never be over, and experiencing the guilt that came along with knowing what the cost of "relief" would be. The work and the grief of those times was all-encompassing and seemed to stretch both forward and back in time, like that was how life always was and would be. I remember believing -- really, truly believing -- that there would never be an end, that life would reside in that hard, relentless place forever. It was awful.

So yes, the last three years really have been tremendously hard; I would wish them on no one. I'm (mostly) proud of what we did for my parents and while hindsight can allow me to wish that we would have done more, I'm really not sure that we could have. We did our best and we loved them, and there isn't much more to offer after that. There are still images of these times that are burned in my head and my heart that I wish would go away. I don't think they ever will. But it's getting so much easier to call up the pictures of them when they were younger and stronger and smiling, and I'm glad about that.

These days we seem so caught up in getting, well -- caught up. We're three years behind so there's a lot of catching up to do. It's tiring and while sometimes there are little victories it doesn't feel all that fulfilling. I don't want to look back in 10 years and not be able to remember what Sara was doing this summer because I was too busy cleaning out closets and painting bedrooms and trying to figure out how to have a life.

So, I guess that's the upside to the blog: it will do the remembering for me. Wonder what I'll be reading about then? I better get to work being more interesting. Now that would be an undertaking. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

12:16. Monday morning. Patients to see in just 8 hours. Then what? Guess I'll have to check back in 10 years and find out...