Look to the skies. On Thursday, March 24, 2011, the skies were partly cloudy, just the right height for the clouds to orchestrate the grays, whites and blues highlighting landscapes for the inter-valley areas through which I was driving which were as green as they were going to be in this area for a year. The southern California law of odds says a warm spell would follow the weather we just had and one would hope the ensuing paradise would last beyond the late spring and summer brown which follows. It never does, and forever is out of the question for too many things.

For this day, many wondered if the storms occurring to the north would track down, or would the usual shift of the jet stream would render the season as we normally remember it. No one remembered a day like the preceding Sunday, six plus inches of rain with the roar of the peak torrents becoming as common as traffic noise.

Previous, too, was my Dad going into a hospital with pneumonia symptoms and worse. The word was he had leveled a couple of times but the pain and congestion returned. "Word," say his grandchildren and the current generation. The word was very discouraging. Today I would have lunch with Mom at the facility she and Dad had been in since late fall and then go over to the hospital a few miles away. When I arrived for lunch the brother and wife who now were taking care of most parental things were there with Mom looking up Dad's one sister in some old personal phone books, since the online option so foreign to my parents had indeed yielded nothing. At the hospital we planned to dial for Dad and let him talk to the sister.

He was asleep when we got there. Nurses came and went but "word" again started the paradox of one's insides sliding even as one felt one's person nailed in a most unwanted place. Finished one after briefing us, "This doesn't look good." Like the skies, I had been wondering where this was leading. Now it appeared another one-time deluge was assembling itself in the eyeless frown I always knew it would have.

Nieces and one of their significant others started arriving and I heard word of a priest being called. In previous hospital visits I would look over charts: by the bed and the room grid in the floor control rooms in hall walks in which now the thought of, "When am I getting to leave?" had shifted context. Now it was about avoidance, no curiosity about nurse names or a discharge projection. The color codings darkened into one verdict. In the other rooms one heard laughter and fleeting complaints, doctors discussing symptoms. In this room the patient on the other side of the curtain was wheeled out, wearing a frown which seemed so inviting now. This was happening to Dad, happening to us.

The final approach commenced with the nurse describing what the machines were telling. More sobs and muttered non-words all pointing to, "Why?"

There are not really books written for this, as many as we allegedly see. The book of days will say I was there to see Dad die and even then the ambiguity makes one only clench the jaw. He never regained consciousness; two nieces are fledgling nurses and know how to read machines. There was a final light snort, a stillness, some ambiguity about a couple of signs. Religion posits a moment of death, but in one like this the answer plays tricks.

On my drive home the freeway joined the route I had driven home from my last day of work. Now it was daylight and traffic was tight with the population at large forming a Thursday rush hour, "The most dangerous one of the week," as a close friend has put it in her expertise. I imagined the green of the surrounding hills awakening many thoughts when lighted by the inevitable sun, but now just as for the last work day the drizzle was building.

And in the hours before the dawn it would pour again.