He sat in the driver’s seat, idly watching the raindrops pat against the windshield, waiting outside the ER for the doctor to finish inserting the PICC line so that, hopefully, they could go home. Just yesterday he had enacted the same wait outside the vet, for the cat. Aggressive infections in both instances, but no PICC for the cat, just injection, observation, and another blood test.

     We’re all wearing out, he thought, shifting his knee and hearing it creak. The car needs work too, but all the money this month has gone to the vet, the hospital, and the folks who fixed her wheel chair lift. If “fixed” is the right word for coaxing a thing from frozen to merely balky. And the twins plan to move out and will want help with the rent. There’s not enough money in the world for what the world needs, much less what it wants.

     The pats had turned the glass to one vague smear; he couldn’t see out now if he wanted to, had he wanted to. But he was isolated in his thoughts, with no interest in the world without. He should be in the ER, with her. Wrapping her shins, rubbing her back, distracting her from the constant agony of the cellulitis. Supporting, comforting, absorbing her ire and pain, as a convenient target, if nothing else. A duty borne for the love he hoped she still harbored, or the memory of it. The need, at least. But not now. He was irrelevant, in the way; politely made to understand as much by the nurse who suggested he might prefer to wait elsewhere. The foyer. The car. So here he was, useless.

     There used to be more to life. There used to be a time when it wasn’t just one damned thing after another. This appliance breaking down, or that. This pet. That person. When the rapid, staccato disintegration of the world was a slow growth, a blossoming, an opening, a parade of joys in which the occasional sorrows might be lost. Inverted, now. The world turned upside-down. Disasters that hardly leave time for the incidentals. The lawn, the trash, the dishes, the laundry. Can’t sweat the small stuff. Only I’ll have to, soon, or we’ll have nothing left to wear.

     He missed the cat, safe at home, hopefully asleep and not shredding the furniture in vengeance from last night’s forced medication, or in anticipation of tonight’s, from both of which he wore, or would wear, the scars. Those needing work felt no gratitude for the work done, or to those who did it. Still, he missed the cat, in all its hurt and anger, and he missed his wife, in all of hers. He didn’t know what to do with himself, in these enforced breaks. So much easier to do the work, while trying to avoid needing work done himself. No one else to do it, with the kids leaving. Not that he could ask them. They needed to live their own lives, not his.

     I remember that need. The need for independence, to break free, to live for ones’ self, apart from the stifling demands of those who went before. Then you find living for yourself is empty, that true contentment needs a higher purpose, needs living for others. You can overdo it, of course. And it can still get ahead of you. You can still fail, be unneeded. An old man in an old van in a world weeping over something else entirely. God knows what.

     He waited, blind and deaf to the continuing pats of rain he saw and heard, letting them impact and run down his memory without penetrating, just as they ran down the glass.