Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

tl;dr cattitude's father can't safely live alone anymore, and after lots of back and forth, it looks like he's moving to an assisted living place in Lowell, near cattitude's sister's house, and also a lot closer to us than Niskayuna is. Cattitude will be spending a couple of weeks in Niskayuna, to keep his father company and do some stuff related to the move. We'll miss him, and he will miss us and the cats, but there are phones, and email and text messaging and zoom, and we will manage.

At greater length: A few weeks ago, cattitude's father fell and was unable to get up again. He didn't get help until the next morning, when paramedics came and took him to the hospital to be checked out. At various times we've been told things including that he was basically fine aside from being weak; that he'd had at least one stroke; that the scans did show evidence of small strokes, but not recently; that he had bladder cancer and we might be looking at hospice; and that no, it's just a urinary tract infection. Tom also told someone, now, that he'd known for about a year that if he fell on the floor he would be too weak to get up on his own, but he hadn't told anyone, including his doctor.

Tom was discharged from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility several days ago, and the doctor now thinks he'll be well enough to move to assisted living in another few days. Cattitude's sister is good at making plans, so she had found and looked into this assisted living place a couple of years ago. She talked to them recently, and they do ha

Family members have been taking turns going to Niskayuna, visiting Tom in the hospital, and doing stuff related to their father moving to assisted living, including making arrangements for selling Tom's extensive, and I gather valuable, antique collection.

Cattitude is planning to take a bus to Albany tomorrow afternoon, and spend a couple of weeks visiting his father and doing useful things. The timing is planned so he and his younger brother will both be there for one night, and can talk and possibly deal with paperwork. He's going to spend a couple of weeks there (or possibly less, depending on when Tom moves to Lowell).

Tom retired from IBM basically at the mandatory retirement age, and arranged to take his lab equipment to SUNY Albany, which gave him space to set up his lab, and the title of Associate Professor (adjunct). He wasn't teaching any classes, but he was working with grad students when that made sense. He was going to the lab occasionally until 2020, and spent the first year or so of the pandemic writing up his data for publication. That's 20 years after he "retired" from IBM: cattitude sums it up by saying that his father "aced his retirement."