Sublimity: Population 2,148. Every time my car reaches the town limits, I check to see if anyone has bothered to count my parents and change the sign. Of course, I know it will change officially after the next census. Still, occasionally I feel an irrational urge to take a paintbrush to it at 3 a.m., so that in the morning, everyone will know the population has reached 2,150.

In the past two years, most of my vacation hours have become allotted to driving five hours away, visiting my parents in a now-familiar bucolic pioneer Oregon town called Sublimity. My mother's apartment overlooks a duck pond under towering Douglas fir trees, near a white steepled chapel built by German settlers with gothic stained glass windows, and a classic early-20th-century water tower. My father lives next door in a dementia care unit.

As in any town, large or small, people come and go all the time. Because of Sublimity demographics, it happens more frequently, as it has become home to one of the largest retirement communities in the state. Marian Estates offers  a range of options from independent living apartments and houses to nursing home wards with 24-hour care. A steady supply of people are always moving in. They just don't always move on as they might in most other towns.

Before my parents moved to Sublimity, they lived in a different retirement community in a yet another small town just a few miles away. Family and friends visited them in their home. They traveled to the coast and mountains with their camper, shopped in the "big city," took sightseeing trips with fellow residents, and hosted celebrations at the center's community room. Eventually, even that small house and the chores that accompanied autonomy became too much for them. So we - their children - encourged and facilitated their move to an assisted living apartment within the same complex. Our mother, however, just couldn't help herself. She was a retired nurse, and she just had to care for him. Until she no longer could.

Suddenly, our mother was ill and hospitalized, the prognosis grim. I spent the greater part of a month with them, making quick trips back home to pick up work, participate in crucial meetings, and restock my wardrobe.

With our mother sick for so long, our father quickly "decompensated," as they say in the business.

Without her around to keep him oriented, their living arrangements quickly became untenable. The extent of Dad's forgetfulness and his need for 24-hour care became crystal clear. We also discovered they were not going to be able to "age in place" where they were. So, with our mother's survival in doubt, my sisters and I (with the long-distance support of our brothers), made arrangements to move our father from their assisted living apartment to the nursing home in Sublimity.

The night we drove him there, he was disoriented, still recovering from a series of bad falls and a brief hospitalization across the hallway from our mother. In his new, thankfully temporary but still heartbreakingly institutional-looking room, he was mostly preoccupied with finding the bathroom and learning where the adult diapers were (and whether they were the kind that didn't bulge uncomfortably).

We managed to remain fairly upbeat and cheerful in his presence as we told him goodnight. Wearing his new pajamas, he perched up on an old hospital bed, set in one corner of the flourescent-lit, daffodil-yellow, nearly empty room. At least for a day or so, while being evaluated, he would stay in "his" new unit named, like all the other units, after a type of tree. (The staff referred to the different wards by their arboreal names, bizarrely reminiscent of summer camp counselors discussing plans with the parents, except, as with everything else in our new topsy-turvy world, the roles were reversed). Rather than campfire smoke, the non-Dad odors in his new room hinted at the spectre of other fathers and mothers, long come and gone.

We had braced for a fight. He was too confused to realize or care where he was. After the goodbyes, somehow my legs managed to carry me down the hall and out to the car. Sobs burst from somewhere deep within before the car door had even shut. Later, when my sisters and I compared notes, we learned we had all reached our cars to head off in different directions, only to be overcome by tears and guilt, second-guessing what we had just done.

More than a year later, Dad has his own room in a different unit than where he stayed those first few nights. For him, it is now home. We try to keep him surrounded with familiar things: a quilt, a lap blanket, his Bible, books, photographs to remind him of family, other personal memorabilia. After a recent hospitalization, he could hardly wait to be discharged, frustrated and disoriented by an unfamiliar staff and routine. He was so happy to be out of the hospital and back where he knew everyone, he hugged and kissed his fellow residents and the staff.

When possible, I try to visit when there is no crisis, staying in one of the on-site visitor apartments or (often sleeplessly) on my mother's couch. Usually I am only able to visit for a day or two, occasionally longer. Sometimes, three or more months go by before I can get back. It's often because of a new emergency.

No matter how necessary it feels to be here or there, I am torn: never there enough, never home enough.

Every time I make the trip, my father has lost more of himself. Until recently, he seemed sure I was one of his daughters. With every visit, he now seems less-certain. Now, when feeling well enough, he searches my face for clues. On the most recent visit there, I was still a familiar face.