This time, the blood clot could not be removed. His speech, once again, is slurred. He can’t swallow and movement is not what it once was. But he can laugh and lift his arms and make gestures for me to tip the nurse aides. He can tap his hands to the beats of qawwali, Bhupen Hazarika, the Beatles and Kiss. He can cry over seeing his eldest grandchild and stories my mother tells about coming to America.

He’s still here.

After a week of this, and his clear misery over being in the hospital and fed through a nose tube, we had to decide what to do. He’s demonstrated ability to swallow occasionally and the speech therapist believes it will come back. The rehab center he went to last time — where he is beloved for his quirky affections toward Russian writers, McDonald’s and words like haberdashery — has called us to tell us they are ready for him and willing to try to fix this. Again.

And so we, who already have been so lucky to have a father like this and then over the last year stayed lucky as he returned to and redefined normalcy, are rolling the dice. He’s on a feeding tube, known in medical parlance as a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube, and we’re planning a release to rehab this week.

We’re optimistic but I’m also filled with second-guessing myself and his own wishes. Several times Papa has told me that he thinks Oregon’s right-to-die laws are a better way, that he does not want his own quality of life to be compromised, that if it comes to it, especially in the case of dementia or being incapacitated, he wants me to take him to Oregon.

Where, I wonder, does a possibly-temporary feeding tube fit into that plan? As he was wheeled off to surgery, he cried and I cried and I asked, “Do you understand what is happening?” He nodded. I said, “I know what you want. But I think we gotta try and there’s work ahead of you.”

I encountered this article almost exactly a year ago when my dad had his first stroke. In it, doctor and ethicist Ezekiel Emanuel (incidentally Rahm Emanuel’s brother) says he hopes to die by age 75. He writes:

living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

I was seduced by the thought as I read, likely on my commute into work, dispassionate, disconnected, far from the hospital bedsides and waiting rooms where these decisions need to be made (and quickly). Under this logic, my father would not have had the year he had post stroke #1. Trips to Phoenix. Vancouver. Rome. Delhi. Upper Assam. Kolkata. A return to his boyhood home in Sadiya alongside the Brahmaputra. The third-grade African dance performance at PS 217. Its international dinner this month. A backyard party with a dosa station, bouncy house, BBQ and ice-cream truck. An 80th birthday brunch in Guwahati. Meeting all his siblings last month. Flying first class. Seeing “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Water aerobics. Chair yoga. Taking the subway to see the Broadway musical “Come From Away.” The Oscars when “Parasite” won. Binge-watching “Cheer” on Netflix.

It was a year of living.

I like to think I appreciated that at the time but I confess the pragmatic side of me also lamented the loss of the father I once had. The one who did my taxes and served as a sounding board on real-estate decisions and investments and stuck up for my younger, smart-alecky child and assured us she was not naughty just very very smart. The one who drove and never forgot a date or number. He was a different father this last year. I missed the old.

Did I value him, his progress, his transformation, his life enough?

On our way to Papa’s birthplace in Sadiya, back in December, we passed the Assam Air Force Academy and he tried to tell a story. This happens often where he has a lot of memory and context but he can’t get it all out. “Eric Sevareid,” he said. “He reported here.” In the moment, I googled the name and found this famous war journalist’s connection to Assam. And it seemed satisfactory but I also felt sad for not getting my dad’s fuller perspective. I missed my father.

After my brother called me to tell me about the second stroke last week, I remembered that moment. And I went down a deeper internet rabbit hole, finding a series of quotes from Sevareid that seemed to get at what my father might have meant. This one made me stop in my tracks and understand this new world order and a pendulum swinging between global connectivity and insularity:

…we are not Rome; the world is too big, too varied. The ‘American Century’ concept of Henry Luce was an absurdity, too. We were not born to be imperialists; we never learned the style, and the time for this is gone. We understand the concept of citizen, not that of subject.

It turns out I still need my father to explain the world to me. And he’s able and willing.

So when the doctors asked whither feeding tube, I think we owed it to him, ourselves, the universe to try.

Being in the hospital and grappling with these issues of life and death makes think of my friend Lauren Alix Brown, who passed away in October. When we worked together, she and I used to have a thing for blogs devoted to these issues, tracking certain writers religiously as they wrote their way through cancer and depression — and shared their journeys so readily and openly on the internet. I see less of that now. I practice less of that now.

One of our favorites was Lisa Bonchek Adams, whose words I revisited this week as if she were an old friend. When she died, Lauren and I mourned as though she really had been a friend. I found this Lisa piece that serves as a counterargument to Emanuel’s hope to die by 75: the fierce case to LIVE. She wrote:

Give my children a kind word. Let them know what they meant to me. That I would have stayed forever if I could. Don’t try to comfort my children by telling them I’m an angel watching over them from heaven or that I’m in a better place: There is no better place to me than being here with them.

She was 45 when she died. Lauren was 37. My dad just turned 80. It’s not the same. Or is it?

My friend Annalisa came to stay with us this week. Like me, she loved Lauren. She knew I felt underwater and offered to make us tiramisu. Her home back in Italy is ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak in that country. As we discussed the far-off concept of contagion and the much-closer situation of my father, she told me about a Facebook post in Italy reminding the world not to write off the elderly, who have been more likely to succumb to the virus. Her translation:

Even if they are unaccustomed to thinking that they will die of old age, they still know that they live of old age, and that sometimes a sudden impulse can shake them like a distant memory, like a spring in February that feels freezing, but puts out a flower all the same.

It’s cold outside. We made it to rehab. Again. I sit by my father’s bed, filled with warmth and hope, love and gratitude for this life we still get to live.

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This has been the worst Tuesday.

Lauren Brown, who taught me the internet, which is basically my life, just died at age 37. I hired Lauren at Quartz in the summer of 2012 as my deputy. Until then, I had always been the deputy.

Lauren joined us from Business Insider. I never worked in digital before so it fell on Lauren to teach me WordPress, how to size photos, how to run a Twitter account, how to write headlines that people actually click on. She was patient and hard-working, and together, we crafted a vision for what modern-day commentary could look like. In her memo to me pitching herself for the job, Lauren wrote:

“While having commentary from notable figures is essential, the social web has proven that people don’t necessarily care where a story comes from or often who is writing it — they just want to read something interesting. This affords us a great opportunity to tap into new voices and unlikely experts; people on the ground around the world who are witnessing firsthand the forces behind macro-economic changes. This allows us to be granular and authoritative in a way that U.S.-centric publications aren’t.”

And that’s what we did. We called ourselves “Ideas editors” and set out to change the definition of who gets to opine: kids who love soccer, unemployed Greek teens, playwrights obsessed with Robert Mugabe. Lauren also made us take the high road on twerking. We switched up formats; it was Lauren’s idea to Google Hangout with women discussing freezing their eggs.

Along the way, we developed possibly the most intimate work-life friendship of my career. Lauren was the OG ally and made sure I was never alone in advocating for diversity in content or hiring or thinking. She loved my kids, saved my marriage and never judged whatever diet I was on. During a crisis of confidence in my mid-30s and that stupid period where journalists obsessed over “brand,” Lauren’s love and support were unconditional and all-sustaining.

She showed up even after I moved on from Quartz. Art shows, brunches, farewells, a Diwali party … in Los Angeles. Then over the last year, she went quiet. I knew something was up and didn’t know how to reconnect without being intrusive about her health. Lauren’s last gift was letting me back in.

After some management changes at Quartz a few weeks ago, we resumed our gossipy texting sessions. We made plans to meet. They fell through. I persisted. She relented. We ended up reconnecting at the hospital last week, a poignant and hilarious visit covering pets, books, democracy and so much shit talk. We kept texting all week and I followed her amazing advice on what to say to people when they have cancer. “I’m thinking about you.” “I’d like to tell you about my day…” On Sunday, Lauren texted me to tell me she loved me, itemized the reasons why and told me time was running out. I told her I couldn’t say what I wanted on text and asked if I could write her a listacle (ever the digital duo we were) of my love. I emailed it off. I sent a follow-up letter with more gossip and a list of people thinking of her. She died the next day.

It was Lauren who wrote: “My life is no more of a struggle than anyone else’s… we’re all trying to survive until that’s no longer an option. Facing that reality requires as much bravery as it takes, every day, to endure the constellation of tragedies that make up a life.”

And it was Lauren who wrote: “I choose to believe in love in spite of what, at times, has felt like endless rejection and disappointment. I decide that this Tuesday will be the best Tuesday ever, even though the medicine I have to take to prevent a recurrence of cancer has prevented me from sleeping through the night for nearly six months now. I try to run every day because, regardless of the health benefits, or the calories burned, I know that I will feel better for just having done it.”

This started out as the worst Tuesday ever. Her mom texted me that “Laur,” as she called her, was gone. Then the whole world — literally, that’s the distributed nature of Quartz’s staff and its diaspora — began texting, calling, emailing, sobbing. I felt myself awash in love and condolences and sent more back out into the universe. So many randoms from the early days of Quartz. Some I hadn’t heard from in years (and never thought I would again!). Contributors who thanked us for editing them and giving them platform. The irony of this: I want to let her know but I have no Lauren to text anymore.

I scroll through her messages and writings and read this anew: We get to decide. Tuesday brought tears and tragedy — but above all, love. So much love, in multiple newsrooms, across multiple platforms, from all corners of the world.

It was the best Tuesday ever.

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I had Mrs. Blader — and I will forever call her Mrs. Blader, despite her asking me to call her Bonnie or BB — as my high school journalism teacher and newspaper adviser. The name of our paper was the Pirate’s Eye and we served the then-lone high school in West Windsor, N.J. I was the managing editor but in her true socialist style, there were like eight of us in that position.

Mrs. Blader changed the course of my life. It was not just lessons on the structure of stories and inverted pyramid styles, rather it was her belief in us. Specifically in me.

I confess we did not get off on the right foot.

I met her in the fall of 1990. In that first week of journalism class freshman year, during one lesson, my friend Angela and I could not stop laughing. Mrs. Blader had just moved from the middle school to high school and was trying to use a journalism textbook. There was one part of the textbook that asked students to devise a game as a way to tell a story. Angela and I came up with “Shoot the apple off of Mrs. Blader’s head.” Rightfully, she got mad — and we just laughed.

The next day, she came back to class and said, “That textbook is stupid and you guys are right.” And for the rest of the year, we studied journalism by doing journalism. How lucky we were. How right she was. How transformational for students to see a teacher pivot lessons and approach before their eyes.

For an early lesson on writing leads, Mrs. Blader dug into her own work from once upon a time as a journalist. She was writing a story about a whale and led with these words — “Call me Bonnie.” And since that moment when I was 14 years old in her journalism class in high school, anytime someone references Moby Dick or the infamous phrase “Call me Ishmael,” I think of Bonnie Blader.

As the years went by, we would spend countless hours putting the paper to bed in the computer lab. The stories we did were tough: a new climate of standardized tests, the death of a classmate, issues of race and class in high school. You will not be surprised to learn that she pushed us to be inclusive, to develop a social conscience, to embrace journalism as a calling, as a purpose that could really change the world.

In my junior year, Mrs. Blader took me aside and showed me a flier for a “minorities journalism workshop” being held at a local college. I never identified as a minority before that moment. Mrs. Blader told me to apply and wrote my recommendation. I got in, gained professional exposure to journalists around the country, and landed an internship at the Wall Street Journal as a senior in high school. The rest, as they say, is history.

Another student — an African-American girl — applied years after me and did not get in. Mrs. Blader never forgave the program for it and vowed to stop sending kids. She was righteous like that but honestly I respected it. In hindsight, I see how she taught me to stand up for myself in mainstream institutions, that the only way we could change things was by taking a stand.

She was a remarkable teacher in this regard because we were just teenagers but she truly respected us, our thoughts, our writing, our voices.

We stayed in touch over the last 25 years, sporadically. When I got in a car accident, she readily offered Stephen and their helpful advice got me . When my first book came out, she hosted a reading in downtown Princeton. I loved getting her emails — and her passion to instigate change. Her words exuded warmth and wit.

I combed through some recent ones to retrieve the beauty that was Mrs. Blader as a writer.

She told me about her efforts to bring broadband to this region, which I think were just a continuation of her fervent belief that information is power:

“I walked around yesterday and had to laugh at myself for tearing up as I watched a line of new poles being raised by the various sub-contracting entities doing the make-ready work.”

A few years ago, I told her my mom wanted her email address or phone number to thank her:

“Your parents are determined to get me into heaven, I think. I’m not sure I deserve the laurels they’re willing to lay at my feet but I think they are wonderful to think so, and very kind.”

She told me about this center and a vote you all had:

“The voter turnout was pretty big, over 300 people out of the 500 in-town voters. There’s a ‘grudge’ pot being stirred that drew them out and it was a relief to end the night with the winners being the ones who are most likely to keep the town alive rather than those who are afraid of change and resentful at those who are potentially our future.”

About a needy child she was trying to help:

“Her smile would have lit your living room, but her future was also showing so clearly that it was at the same time a fragile lantern in the wilderness that will be her life. … You can’t live here and not live the reality of the left behind. Nor can you not appreciate the sincerity and grasp of a community where the plight of one seems to be the plight of all, and along with any shortness of vision or mean-spiritedness comes that hand out to hang on to someone just barely able to grab hold. … I’m glad there are other people who are tougher and won’t share that feeling who will push on and maybe change things for the better. People like you, Angela, your kids, supported by people like your parents.”

Last year, after the Parkland shooting, a few of us received an email from her:

“watching the students in Florida has put you all in my mind. How stupid are the observers who think 16, 17, and 18 year olds (or 13, 14 and 15 year olds, or 11 and 12 years olds like my granddaughters) cannot launch a moral movement and articulate their tenets and demand change.

I find myself editorializing through broadcasts at the condescension and ignorance and remembering how you all took your position in the world at just their ages, building on the scaffolding set by your prior life experiences. And I want to crawl through the TV or computer to join the teenagers who might be the ones who bring the change. I’m expressing my admiration for the people you were from the first moments I encountered you all. I hope you use your platforms to accurately illuminate this movement. I was not surprised that the student journalists did journalism in the moment, and that they have continued to speak. I find myself with a new mantra: Don’t back down. Don’t back down.”

Her words came at a time I really needed them. I work at CNN and every day come threats to the work we do of holding the powerful to account. And I think they crystallize why she got into teaching, her effectiveness as a community organizer and communicator. Don’t back down, she said. We won’t, Mrs. Blader. You never did. Thank you.

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“It just feels so perfect that I live in fear of losing all of it,” I told her. “Like all the time, I am aware of how lucky we are.”

Over the last few weeks, of course, imperfection has crept in. Our lives also have felt a bit on hold after my dad’s stroke. I so feel for my mom whose entire life has become taking care of my dad, except for an hour at the gym every day and an occasional run to the supermarket.

So it was with incredible guilt that as my father recovered from Pacemaker surgery, my family and I went off to London. It was already a downgrade from a previously planned India trip. But with all the back and forth among work, Jersey and Queens, I felt this need to connect and cling to our unit, far, far away from everything.

That’s precisely what happened. But as I have written before, the lens on everything is as the daughter of my parents. So here we are, taking a picture on Assam Street in the Whitechapel neighborhood. We took in the Kohinoor diamond at the Tower of London and I thought about how my father, once a mining engineer, always loved the gems section of a museum.

I returned to Papa, visibly making great progress. Last week, he told me that he understands everything we are asking of him but he has to think for several minutes to find the right word. I think the ability to articulate this, though, is a gamechanger. I told him about neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor (again) and how she can better explain how the brain works and his difficulty in recall. She says it best here:

It’s amazing what filing cabinets OPEN, though, as someone you love goes through such a challenge. And her same analogy is one I think of as I begin to resume a semblance of the life we had a few months ago, before I felt I had to put everything on hold: one filled with theater, art, movies, impromptu gatherings at my house. Because of the upbringing I had, it feels almost impossible for me to process the world without culture and constant escape from said world. I need those filing cabinets to help me open others. That’s something I learned from my father.

So it is with great guilt, but also necessity, that we are tiptoeing back. I still get scared when I see my mom’s number on my mobile, worried something has happened. I miss their companionship on so many of these excursions they once would have readily joined (the three Assamese movies at the New York Indian Film Festival right now, for example). Yet perhaps it is their physical absence and inability to attend that makes me feel I must go. They continue to haunt my choices, my perspective, my everything.

Indeed, on our London trip, we went to three desi restaurants, prompting my children to ask, “WHO comes to London to ONLY eat Indian food?”

At our last meal, hours before Heathrow, biting into a piece of murgh malai at Dishoom, we realized why. Seven-year-old Riya, invoking her pet name for her grandfather: “This tastes JUST like Ati’s chicken.”

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And so they went, back in an ambulance, back to the hospital, this time the closer one. They installed a pacemaker and he emerged looking better, brighter and more energetic than he’s been. So we’re hopeful. Again.

My younger brother and I met at Penn Station as soon as we heard, took the train down to Jersey and met them at the hospital. We’ve been rotating in recent weeks since we have jobs, lives, spouses and, in my case, kids, to deal with. But in crisis, it feels weird to take turns. And so we all show up. And it’s the five of us. Again.

“Hold up two fingers,” my younger brother commanded my dad in the intermediate critical care unit last night.

Papa held up two fingers.

“Point your finger at your favorite,” I commanded.

Papa laughed. Then he pointed at … Sanjib, my elder brother, who had just been through the harrowing afternoon of a catatonic father, 911 calls, paddles to get his heart rate moving, emergency surgery to install the pacemaker, then us showing up to a calm scene and a fixed father belying all the chaos.

We laughed. Everyone always thinks I’m the favorite. Maybe with this newly wired heart, my dad found a replacement. I’m on board with him taking turns, too.

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Riya was annoyed on behalf of her grandfather. “He’s tired. Leave him alone.”

Over the last few weeks, we’ve witnessed (and partaken in) a fair amount of “elderspeak,” the process of talking down to patients as though they’re babies. Or speaking way louder. Or in the third person, as in, “How are we feeling today?” Nurses, aides, speech therapists, physical therapists, family friends and even, maybe especially, we are guilty. It’s tough with stroke victims because we actually should enunciate and repeat and prod. But I’m sure it’s also annoying for them.

What’s great about having a kid around is how she calls us out on it. She won’t let us baby my dad. She came up with this STRICT schedule for Papa and barks orders, 7-year-old to 79-year-old. Holding up objects and sternly saying “what is THIS??” Tell me what the main idea is. Make a pair. Write my name.

I love how she gave him two minutes to check his blood sugar and three hours to nap.

My friend recommended a great book “The Stroke of Insight.” Here’s a relevant passage:

What’s great to see is the progress Papa palpably making and the delight his granddaughter brings him. I presume she knows how annoying it is when the grownups talk down to you, after all.

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I don’t know if most people feel this way. I imagine so. I do know that the love between my parents and me is something next level and that I have been scared of the inevitability of their deaths as long as I can remember. When I was 7 and 8 years old, I whispered these words every night: “Dear God, Please make sure the baby in Mommy’s tummy is healthy and please make sure my parents live forever.”

My little brother was born (healthy). I stopped praying. We grew up. My fears remain.

I’ve thought often about what it is about immigrant families that makes our love different. I think it starts with migration itself. Most people say migrants come to America for education or opportunity. I have interviewed literally hundreds of folks on this subject and that is simply not true. Most are escaping something. Debt, alcoholism, abuse, a bad breakup, brothers, sisters, thin walls, nosy neighbors, a scandal they could never shake, political movements, betrayals, themselves. Immigration, and America specifically, represents the chance to be a new person.

I know this is the case for my parents, too, although I don’t feel that’s my story to tell right now. As a journalist and author, I’ve built a career asking other people about their versions: why they leave and what they create once here, who they create.

Despite being born in Brooklyn, my lens on most things America is my parents’ lens. I thought of this a few weeks ago as I watched The Cher Show on Broadway. The Sonny and Cher renditions, the outlandish outfits, the go-go 70s. I felt no nostalgia, even though I recognized it all. All I could see, now that I am an adult and parent and cultural patron as they were back then, was the image of my parents in their own colorful bellbottoms and brown overcoats.

So much of my connection to THIS country, the land of MY birth, is to see it and understand through THEIR eyes. There’s a racial dimension, for sure, as I find myself in all-white environments all the time. But even getting through that otherness is informed by their moves navigating America: my mom shares food and gives compliments, my dad tells jokes and then drops obscure literary or scientific references to assert his intelligence, they buy secondhand but tip generously. They believe in meritocracy and think working harder is the answer to pretty much anything.

Having my own children made me more like them. With my eldest, as I watched other parents plot bedtimes and stroller purchases, I finally had sympathy for my mother saying some things were just “too American.” This was frustrating code growing up for the things that we could not do. (And I feel the need to point out that my parents were considered among the more liberal Indians because I was allowed sleepovers, Ken Dolls and, eventually, a prom date.) But no overnight camp or frozen dinners. We had no formal bedtime. I slept with my parents till I was at least 14; both my brothers did not last as long but they were there, too. I feel sheepish to say I used to be jealous of my friends whose parents would say I love you. Here’s love. As a kid, my head rested in the crook of Papa’s arm. He smelled like Old Spice and snored. When I reached middle school, I moved over to my mother’s side of the bed, putting her in the middle. She smelled like Nivea cream and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to make me comfortable: scratching my back, caressing my cheek, getting me water at 3 a.m.

It’s also a suffocating love, to be a child of immigrants. I remember each of the phone calls when their own parents or siblings died. A palpable sadness washed over our house, not just for the deaths as much as the fact that we were so far away. In those moments, I could feel my parents turn inward, into our family unit, for that’s all they had. We could go as long as five years in between visits back home. There were aerogram letters and phone calls, infrequent. The more they let go of those ties, the harder, I believe, they clung to us.

We taught each other’s language across generations. My Assamese is not a language spoken in the northeastern region of India. It is the language spoken by my parents. I say words like “oykolo” and “dhoomabala,” made-up words by my mother and have no translation. I had no formal training in my first language, truly my mother tongue. My parents, despite study of English in their schools in India, never learned words like “bake sale” and “Cabbage Patch” and “awesome.” We raised them as they raised us.

Yet we do not speak to one another in the languages we are most comfortable in. And so the ease with which I see my friends banter or debate politics with their parents … that’s not us. We do not discuss matters like “needing space” or “setting boundaries.” And so we have none; I see my parents as an extension of myself and they of me. It only seems to grow stronger as I grow older.

Since Papa’s stroke, my fears have enveloped me. I see McDonald’s and think of him buying senior coffee. I hear a Hindi song and think of him playing it. I see his books in my house, everywhere. I fast forward to the inevitable day my parents will not here and I wonder how I won’t be stopped in my tracks all the time, immobile from grief.

And yet as I toggle between his house and my own, I am overcome with a longing for what I know might soothe me: my own children.

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I resent the question because it unfairly skews responsibility on the shoulders of one person. A few years ago, my response (during a keynote at a women’s conference in Montana) was as follows:

Simple question: How do you do it?

The answer is I don’t. We do. We have supportive parents, in-laws, neighbors, nannies and friends. I have a husband who doesn’t complain about me working late or too much. …

Every time I get a promotion or a new job, my mother makes it a point to call my nanny and says, “Thank you so much for all you do for her and the children. It would not be possible without you.” Then she calls me and says, “Don’t you dare keep all the money for yourself. Give the sitter a raise.”

I’ve been thinking about this now that my father’s home and we need to plot the next few weeks of care. And I think if I could answer the question now, I would add one thing. How do I do it? I ask for help. And I have no shame in doing so.

Some examples from the last few weeks alone:

And so I found someone who seems perfect. She asked for a certain amount. I offered more.

The next morning, I woke up to a text message from a fellow mom who picked up my little one.

There also have been so so so many offers for food. In the early days, I said no. Then I noticed that my mom was nibbling on the fruit or nuts people brought. That we were coming home from the ICU famished and too exhausted to cook. I stopped turning people away.

“Your parents have done so much for us,” they’ll often say. They have receipts: loans for cars or college, baby showers, care packages after chemo. The universe is returning their favors.

In the reams written on women and leadership, it’s become popular to encourage us to say “no” and set boundaries as a means to getting ahead. I realized this week why that philosophy has long been disconcerting to me. You give what you get. You can’t get help if you don’t ask. And you don’t get help if you don’t give it.

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Everyone points out the irony of we children taking on the role of caring for our parents. We go from this:

To this:

After his stroke 18 days ago, Papa left rehab this morning. There’s much to celebrate: speech and cognition are improving. His motor skills are excellent. His ability to write and repeat are also great. But if it were a sitcom called “The Sandwich Generation,” you could not have scripted the ride home from rehab any better. I pulled up in my parents’ Honda (desi car of choice) and he got in the front seat. My mom to the back.

Papa’s been really fidgety, a function of being cooped up and nicotine withdrawal. In the hospital and rehab, I kept his hands busy with a Koosh and a Shopkins Squeezekins stress ball. Once in the car, he starts playing with the lock-unlock button. It makes that annoying noise over and over. My daughters both used to do this when they were toddlers. I wanted to kill them.

At the same time, my mom’s Google Maps kicks in — and it’s set to rehab as its destination. I keep yelling at her to turn it off. She says she doesn’t know how.

So that was the 17-minute car ride home. The click click click of the button. The repeated and urgent “Make a U turn” from the phone navigation. Me, gritting my teeth and trying to be a more patient person.

We’re home now. It’s quiet. Both my parents are napping. Make a U turn indeed.

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My family has never done I love you. About a decade ago, my friend Hari encouraged me to write letters to my parents to tell them what they meant to me. Papa never wrote back but wordlessly sent me a flight itinerary to signal an upcoming visit. Last month, my friends and I did the “Whole Life Challenge” and during a week where we had to express gratitude, I texted my dad:

You can see how he responded. (Although, I think there is no greater sign of my father’s love for me than the fact that he has done our taxes for more than 20 years, all through our status changes of being single income, double income, homeowners, overseas workers, freelancers, part-timers, landlords, parents to one kid, parents to two kids, etc.)

This morning, when I walked in, the physical therapist said, “Your dad must be famous. So many people love him!”

Love.

She was basing this on the number of visitors, flower deliveries, balloons, cards, Tupperwares and yogurt containers of daal, rice, rajma, fish, sabji, soup labeled with his name and room number. There’s his co-worker from 20 years ago who stopped by, another co-worker’s widow who sent flowers and a card, his friend from Class 8 flying in from North Carolina, his daughter-in-law’s sister (follow that?) who drove up in Friday rush-hour traffic from D.C.

His face lights up when he sees them and he’s trying really hard to make conversation. We’re all hopeful he gets his speech and cognition back. Even 75% of his brain would exceed my expectations (and intelligence, by the way). The therapists told us to show him old pictures and assign names and memory to them. They told us to quiz him on numbers, letters, days of the week, the months of the year. We’ve been obliging but I keep wondering what fraction of a person’s brain all that represents. And how will he reconstruct a personality through them?

Last night, the nurse helped get him ready for bed. He kept gesturing to the closet and asking my mom for his “moneybag.” Why? In Assamese, he told us, he wanted to tip her. I teared up. His actions have always been how he shows love. Even when he — and we — had the words, we never really used them.

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