My mom called this week to vent to me. Predictably, she was annoyed we had limited 1:1 time while I was in San Francisco since I was out and about with Kaia and friends. So she used this time to complain about my dad, how filthy and unmotivated he is, how almost all their rental units are vacant. She complained about all the mice in the house, the lack of care being done to their own living space, my dad’s general lack of empathy and feeling around everything, including the recent death of her sister. “You think that when your sister dies, your husband would say things to comfort,” my mom lamented. “But no, he just says things to hurt.”

As though to criticize and defend him in the same breath, she also started preemptively saying that regardless of all his flaws, she still needs him to drive her places, to pay all the bills, to take care of the property (not sure what he’s doing in that regard, but this is what she said). She said her back is in bad condition, so she even needs him to help bathe her. But I insisted to her that all the excuses she makes can be taken care of; she can get a scrubbing brush to clean her own back. She can find and hire support online for things like cleaning or sending money to Vietnam. She just got angry, as per usual, and said I didn’t understand. I don’t have wisdom, she said as always, so I wouldn’t know.

It’s the same annoying conversation every time I come home, except now that I didn’t spend time talking to her at home, it’s a post-visit “talk.” And luckily for me, it didn’t go long enough for her to start criticizing me and my life and my choices as it usually does. I understand that my parents both come from places of trauma. They were both unloved and barely cared for as children. They barely had enough food to eat growing up and were both constantly criticized. But I always hoped that one day when they got to retirement, they’d actually start… trying to enjoy life. But as my therapist once said to me, maybe my definition of “enjoying life” is different from theirs. Maybe they’re just very content constantly complaining about and to each other and living in filth and squalor. Maybe they are so used to each other and each other’s snapping that to know anything different is to be in a terrifying world.

I know I am lucky to be in my late 30s and still have both my parents living, even if I am not close to them. A number of friends, former classmates, and colleagues over the years have lost one or both parents. But I always wonder what life will be like for one of my parents once the other one dies. It’s unlikely that they would die at the same time unless a freak accident happened. So how would one handle the other’s death? And what expectations would they have of me in that event?

My mom used to say that if she died before my dad, she would expect that I would quit my job in New York and move back to the house in San Francisco and take care of my dad. I openly scoffed at the idea to her, said that was ridiculous, and I’d never do it. She got upset, responding somberly, “You’ve changed. You’re not the same as before,” in a negative way, clearly.

I don’t know what the future holds for any of our deaths — when, where, how. But I do know that I never, ever want to move back into that awful, decaying house ever again. I call it that because that is what that house is: a place of constant decay where nothing will ever grow or flourish. It’s seriously in need of a thorough Buddhist cleansing or something equivalent so that anyone who chooses to live in a future iteration of it at least has some shot at happiness and success — however they want to define either of those two terms.