The nature of my mother's illness is not germane, except to say that she had surgery three times in a little less than three months.

She is 84, and for the last five months has pinballed between a nursing home and a hospital, less than two miles from her comfortable apartment but a world from the job she still holds, from her just-after-quitting-time trip to the convenience store for a lottery ticket and perhaps some orange juice or bread. I was told today that she can go home in three weeks.

Fifty-five years old and an only child, I have followed her like a dumb, hurt dog, sitting at her bedside after surgery, hunting down a doctor in the emergency room, bringing nail files and cookies to the nursing home. They thought she had cancer, and we waited a week to find out she didn't

I have continued to pay the rent on her apartment, driven her car every so often to keep it lively, managed her checking account and picked up her mail. She'd be mad if I let anything slip.

I deserve no credit at all. No one deserves credit for doing the right thing.

And I have gotten to know that army of the sadly noble, those aging children bringing clean laundry to a nursing home, bringing a book to the hospital, sitting, with a carefully blank look, in the surgical waiting room.

If your parent is in a nursing home for more than a month, and you answer honor's call and go see Mom or Dad every night after work, you will meet others like yourself — gray-haired, serious people who go every day, who have understanding husbands and wives.

The young girls who work as nurses' aides will say to you: "You're a good son. You come every day."

"Whaddaya mean?" I responded to this compliment the first time I heard it. "She's my ma. Where am I supposed to be when she's sick? In a bar watching the game?"

"You don't see what we see," the young girl said to me.

Both the aide and I knew she meant at least, but not at most, that room diagonal to my mother's, where the skinny old woman lay small under the white blanket, occasionally falling to a minutes-long spasm of wet, tearing cough. No one ever entered that room who was not paid to enter that room.

A half-hour before work. A couple hours after work. All day on your days off. All day, every day on your vacation week.

You meet the others. The burly, bearded-to-the-eyes truck driver who comes with his wife very night to see her mother, exploding every mother-in-law joke in the world. The thin, fashionable woman who hangs at the bedside of a crumpled, old-country woman. They speak Portuguese.

You talk to each other. Why not?

"They got her off the oxygen," a woman in jeans says. Or a man in golf clothes says, "They told me he's eating better."

We don't go to dinner with our wives and husbands. Our kids know "Daddy's visiting grandma." It's no sacrifice at all, but a bartender named Billy has not seen me in nearly five months.

In the quiet nursing home hallway with the green upholstered chairs at the end, where Dad can sit with you if he's using the walker. In the parking lot of the nursing home, in the iron, rainy fall dark. Wetting a paper towel and wiping vomit from her chin in a curtained-off chunk of the emergency room. The doctor will be in to see her soon.

My mother is a genuine New England Yankee. To her, public displays of emotion are "foolishness."

"We're not emotional people," I said to my mother one night in the emergency room. "But I love you."

"You're right," she said. "We're not emotional people."

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com