I have just put down the phone after talking, cross-country, with my older brother. Our conversation was about the adjustments that need to be made in our father's life to accommodate his diminishing ability to live independently.

At the age of 93, Dad is slowing down. Although he remains sharp in conversation about things that interest him, his short-term memory has diminished. He is not as strong as he was three years ago, when he thought nothing of climbing a ladder while carrying a bucket of reflective roofing material and then spreading it evenly over the surface of the roof-in 114 heat! He is not quite as adventurous as he was two years ago when he and a friend went on a tour of Europe. Nowadays, the shop in which he worked on inventions stands silent and abandoned. Because Dad's reflexes also have slowed, my brother has disabled the machinery out there that could easily maim our father if another brilliant idea inspired him to return, however briefly, to check out the potential for a new twist on some old idea.

Although he has designed some very useful gadgets in his time, my dad's Magnum Opus was not created in his machine shop. With my mother as a partner for 65 years, his greatest achievement is a large family powerfully bound together by love and interdependency. It was what the two of them worked hardest to build, and it remains their greatest success.

How often I heard, throughout my childhood and onward, my dad reminding us that no matter how angry any of us got, "In this family we don't disown..." "In our family we don't stop talking to each other." Both he and my mother were capable of great anger, and we six children gave them plenty of opportunity to experience it. But, even as our personalities strengthened during our teen years, not one of us ever walked out, nor was one of us ever ordered to leave. Part of the reason for this was that in that time and in that place, outright disrespect or back-talking toward parents simply wasn't a concept. Yet, there was something stronger at work, a deep awareness that we all needed and complemented each other, that our family was a unit, and that that was the way we wanted it to continue.

As we got older and developed political and social points of view that differed from those of our parents, it was only through hard experience that we learned to sometimes make a choice between proving a point and remaining members of the same family. The latter choice always won out.

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