My dad and I are sitting in a booth at El Torito. I am nursing a margarita, Dad's got a bottle of beer, and the Mexican food will arrive soon. This has become a ritual for us, eating out three times a week, since we sold Dad's house in Texas and moved him to California a year ago at age 83. "Kick 'em!" he says, and we clink our glasses and connect--more than we ever connected before. Since Mom died more than two years ago, we hug and kiss--things we never did when I was growing up and he was a workaholic architect out to change the world.
"So what happened to that guy in our family who works for TIME?" he asks, smacking his lips in pleasure after another swig. My dad has been having trouble keeping relationships straight for a few months now. At his worst point, after a fall last September, he thought I was his mother. When I'd kid him about the mistake, he'd laugh hard, turn really red and run a hand over his balding head, his lifelong gesture of consternation. But even then, when I was his "mother," he still managed in some convoluted way to hold on to one thing: he was proud of his daughter at TIME, who had interviewed Fidel Castro and traveled with the Pope.
Now suddenly I don't exist.
"Dad, that's me, your daughter, Cathy, who works at TIME. I'm here. It's me. There is no guy in our family. I'm your only child. Remember?"
Surely, I think, I can reason him out of this. But he looks angry and tells me I'm wrong and relates--in great detail--a late-night meal of takeout chicken we once consumed at my desk when I was working late. "Yeah, Dad, that was me," I tell him. His blue eyes--destroyed years ago by glaucoma and cataracts--stare forlornly back at me. "Well, that's what you keep telling me," he says. He looks sad, confused. He starts making a thin whistling sound, a sign I recognize as his signal of distress.
All around us there's the revelry of sports fans watching a game on TV. I register the girl at the next table sitting on her boyfriend's lap, the guys screaming at the TV screen, the happy faces all around, and I feel utterly alone. I am alone. My dad is gone. He's here, but he's not. I want to cry, but instead I sit there with my margarita, my face contorted, holding it all in, my soul ripped in a thousand places.
I'm hardly the only one going through this experience. It has become the baby boom generation's latest, and in some ways most agonizing, life crisis: what to do when the parents who once took care of you can no longer take care of themselves. The age wave is mounting: 33 million Americans, an unprecedented 13% of the population, are over 65. Their ranks will more than double by 2030. The number of Americans 85 and older has nearly tripled since 1960, to 4 million, and will more than double that over the next 30 years. Along with that explosion has come a growing, and often confusing, array of living and caring options. (See following story.)