My sisters left me to care for our dying dad on my own

"Hannah?”

It was my father on the line. “Hi, Dad, what’s up?”

“Um, this is going to sound crazy, but — what’s my phone number?”

My phone number, he remembered, but his own evaded him that day.

This was better than the day before, when he had called in a panic to inform me that he saw 14 soldiers patrolling outside his window. “But don’t worry, Hannah, I already alerted the Department of Homeland Security.”

My father grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in a traditional — but dysfunctional— Jewish family. Hoping to escape the craziness he had been raised with, after marrying my mother, who was raised totally secular, he dropped every last vestige of Jewish observance. Early in their marriage, my parents moved to a sleepy Midwestern town with absolutely no Jewish community. They had three daughters: Stacey, Jennifer, and me.

I was always a Daddy’s girl: My father and I shared a love of math and chocolate, and we would often play basketball in the driveway, or prank each other and laugh together uproariously.

When I was about eight years old, my beloved Daddy was diagnosed with an incurable degenerative disease. All I noticed at that early stage was that he would shuffle when he walked, but apparently the disease was already affecting him more profoundly at that point, because our home environment became very stressed. My parents soon separated, and then, when I was ten, they got divorced.

My father moved back to New York, where he lived with his elderly, infirm mother on the Lower East Side, until her passing several years after he arrived. He would call me every day, often to ask me peculiar questions, such as what his own phone number was, and other times to report on delusional phenomena: “Hannah, the FBI is chasing me over a bridge!” His medications caused him to hallucinate, and with time, his physical condition deteriorated as well. While he did not yet require the help of an aide, he did need someone nearby to help out in a pinch — a spouse would have been ideal — but there was no one around who could do that.

That’s why, when I graduated high school, I chose to attend a college in New York, near my dad. He was only 61 at the time, but his organs were beginning to fail, and he required frequent hospitalization, as well as a part-time aide. He had good days and bad days, and on the bad days he needed help with eating, getting dressed, and going to the bathroom. After he fell and broke his hip, he required a full-time aide.