holding our breath, and a recipe: peach basil sorbet

“Can we have the peach ice cream?” my son asked, looking up at me with his deep blue eyes. It was after dinner, and the kids were bathed and in their pajamas. They were being extra sweet. Maybe they could sense the stress their father and I were under.

Or maybe they’ve just learned how to get what they want.

I had forgotten about the peach ice cream, which wasn’t ice cream at all but was instead peach basil sorbet. The kids didn’t seem to notice the difference, or if they did, they didn’t care. To my children, the melon-colored sorbet was cold and sweet and a perfect ending to their evening.

I had made the sorbet last Sunday, while my husband was visiting his father, something he’s done nearly every weekend for the past six months. Sam’s dad – my father-in-law, known as Papa to our children – was hospitalized back in December after back surgery to repair a fractured vertebrae sustained in a fall. The initial hospitalization was fraught with complications, and as a result, he’s never walked since.

My father-in-law has not been home since that hospitalization in mid-December. Like my own father, he’s been in a nursing facility for the last several months. Unlike my father, there was a hope – an expectation, actually — that my father-in-law would get better, that he would walk again, or at least get used to using a wheelchair and be able to return home.

My husband and I never imagined that, in our early 40s, our lives would revolve around our ailing fathers and visits to nursing homes. Each weekend, though, we alternate who visits which father when, fitting these visits into our lives almost seamlessly. In addition to working full time and parenting our two children, we’ve added those extra glass balls to the ones we already juggle, hoping to keep them all in the air for just a while longer.

Of course, there are so many others in our position: adult children becoming caregivers for ailing parents. I see it daily, in fact, in my oncology practice.

While Sam was gone, I felt like I needed to be productive. Instead of writing (the words just weren’t coming that morning) or cleaning the playroom (a never-ending task that always winds up on my to do list, but inevitably at the bottom), I opted for chopping peaches, fragrant and yielding under my fingers, and making basil simple syrup with the last of the fresh basil leaves. Soon after, the ice cream machine was whirring, churning the peach juice mixture into a fluffy, frozen dessert.

We had the sorbet for dessert that night, a refreshing chaser after a dinner of burgers from the grill and fresh corn on the cob. I stored the sealed glass container of sorbet in the freezer, nestled up next to the blackened bananas (frozen solid, awaiting their future as the starring role in a loaf of banana bread) and the frozen rounds of Trader Joe’s steel cut oatmeal (my favorite weekday breakfast).

And then I forgot about it. Life got in the way, as it has a tendency to do.

My father-in-law was placed on Hospice on Wednesday. His steady, but slow decline has taken a nosedive in the past few weeks. His prospects for recovery, once small, have now become nonexistent. We’re talking to our children about death and dying, and I’ve ordered my son his first tie and dress slacks, to wear at his first funeral. I’m answering questions like, “What does dying feel like, Mommy?” from my 9-year old daughter.

We’re moving toward an ending, and it feels like we’re just holding our breath until it happens.