"Third request?!"

    A measure of how much better my dad is doing is how much of his life I can hand back to him. A couple of weeks ago, I started bringing him requests for proxy votes and stuff like that, items that I could handle easily and which weren't very important or pressing, but which I thought it would be good to let him handle to get him back in the swing of running his affairs.
    For decades now I think he's been part of the Physicians' Health Study run by Harvard. It ended finally just about the time he was going to the hospital. I ignored the first request to fill out the final questionaire because his condition was very much up in the air, and I ignored the second one because at the time he was damn near a zombie thanks to Dilantin. But when the third request came in, I brought it to him yesterday, and he about exploded (but in a nice way) with the subject line above. I explained that his health hadn't been too great and I had been fairly distracted and he subsided and filled it out.
    Sometimes when I leave, he says "Thanks for everything," as he did yesterday. I like it a lot; of course, I have a far greater everything to thank him for. So a little gets paid back.