At one time, my father would drive my mother to New York on dates just so they could get a slice of authentic cheesecake—even in my teens he was known to hunt for the best apple pie all over the state of Michigan, just because. He knew which bakery in Chicago made the freshest doughnuts and drove across the city for a particularly fine custard cake. “If I ever get like that,” he would say of my tiny, elderly nana with her dowager’s hump, chowing on prewrapped brownies and freezer-burned, neon-colored popsicles, “just shoot me.”

Now a big day out for my father is a trip a mile away to the Entenmann’s warehouse, where he can stock up on enough processed coffee cakes and doughnuts covered in waxy chocolate that an avalanche falls out of his freezer when we open it. He buys whichever ice cream is on sale. When my husband and I go shopping for him and buy an ice cream he deems too expensive, he pitches a fit.

“Just shoot me,” he would tell us.

But it’s never that simple. You can’t just snap your fingers and disappear like a magician’s trick. Sometimes you live to turn into your mother-in-law. You remain trapped inside your body, unable to walk, unable to hear, taste buds faded, increasingly incontinent, napping during the day and awake all night, in chronic pain. Waiting.