The phone rings in the middle of a conversation with a Japanese friend about aging parents. She needs to be in the U.S. to make her videos. She needs response. Americans respond, she explains. The Japanese sit quietly, politely. You never know, she says. She is thinking of becoming a farmer to be near her parents who need her response.

I tell her the story of my father's scream. We both laugh at the part of the story when my father escapes from the Home. We cheer, like Californians over water. We cheer as if he'd hit a home run. But he only got to first base when a strike was called. He had to go back to home plate where they restrained him, can you imagine? Yes, we could imagine. We are quiet now, respectful. I wait for her response. Hmmmm, she says, about the problem that has no answer. The story is about dignity, she says. I will like to read your story.

I tell her of a TV program I saw years ago. An old man in a nursing home insisted he had the right to starve himself to death. A nurse looked into the camera and told us she must do her job. "It is my job to feed him," she explained. The man said he had a right to refuse her work. She would still get paid for trying. He was growing very weak and could no longer argue his position. How were members of the audience responding? No one knows. We were like a Japanese audience. Years later I respond,
sitting at my kitchen table with a Japanese friend talking about aging parents and my father's protest.

My story is interrupted with the ringing phone that demands answering. I pick it up. The ringing stops. My mother starts crying and crying. She says she didn't want to do it. Do what? I ask, a little confused, a little scared. The tubes, she blurts. I nod. He was such a dignified man, she says, all his life. It isn't right, she sobs. All three of us agree it's not right but can any one of us in the audience say NO, don't hook up the feeding tube?

I hang up the phone and sit quietly thinking of my father who is fed up.

We are not responsible.
Or we are irresponsible.