I am sitting in my kitchen at 2:14 AM, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the rhythmic thumping of my father’s cane against the floorboard upstairs. This is a suburban cul-de-sac in Ohio, where the lawns are measured to the quarter-inch and the silence is supposed to be SACRED. I’ve spent forty years as a clinical social worker, managing cases, signing off on placements, and explaining the necessity of transition to crying families. Now, I am the case. I am the data point. I am observing my own failure with a level of detachment that would probably alarm a therapist, if I cared to see one. The smell in this house has changed from lavender and floor wax to a sharp, metallic scent of unwashed skin and medicinal tinctures. He has been here three years. When Mom died, I stood in that sterile hospital hallway and promised him—with a certainty that only a well-educated woman in her fifties could possess—that I would NEVER put him in a facility. I told him he would stay in a home, with family, until the end. I viewed it as a moral imperative, a way to distinguish myself from the families I dealt with at the agency who seemed so eager to offload their burdens. I thought my professional background made me IMMUNE to the burnout that claims lesser people. The clinical progression is textbook. We are currently in the late-middle stage of Alzheimer’s. His cognitive deficits are no longer manageable with simple redirection or medication management. Last Tuesday, I found him standing in the driveway at 4:00 AM, wearing nothing but his undershirt and a pair of wingtips, trying to unlock the neighbors’ Lexus with a butter knife. The neighbors, the Millers, were watching from their window. I could see the glow of their bedside lamp. I felt a visceral NEED to explain his neurobiology to them, to justify why my father was a vagrant on their property, but I just led him back inside by the elbow. It was humiliating. Yesterday, the situation escalated from inconvenient to DANGEROUS. I was in the laundry room when I heard a crash. He had decided the toaster oven was a storage unit for his mail. The smell of burning plastic and paper filled the kitchen, and when I tried to pull him away from the smoke, he didn't see his daughter. He saw an intruder. He struck me across the face with a strength that a man of eighty-eight should not possess. My cheek is currently a shade of mottled purple that I’ve spent the morning covering with expensive concealer so I can go to the grocery store and pretend everything is FINE. I’ve started the paperwork for The Willows. It’s a Memory Care Center, which is just a sanitized term for a locked ward with better carpeting. I spent the afternoon reviewing their staffing ratios and their protocol for wandering residents. I am looking at these brochures through a lens of professional skepticism, but underneath that, there is a cold, hard fact: I am breaking a promise. I am becoming the exact person I used to JUDGE during my intake meetings. I used to think those people were weak. Now I realize they were just finished. My former colleagues would say I’m doing the right thing for his safety. They would use words I refuse to utter because they feel like LIES. The truth is that I cannot sustain the facade of the dutiful daughter and the competent professional simultaneously. The system is breaking. I am watching my father’s brain dissolve, and instead of feeling grief, I feel a clinical desire for ORDER. I want my house back. I want the smell of burnt plastic to leave my curtains. I want to sleep for twelve hours without listening for the sound of the front door being forced open. People in this neighborhood talk. They see the ambulance when it comes, they see the erratic behavior, and they offer thoughts and prayers while secretly thanking God it isn't their house. I don't want their sympathy. I am making a logistical decision to outsource the remainder of my father's life because I have reached the limit of my utility. I am a failure, objectively speaking, based on the parameters I set for myself twenty years ago. I am okay with that. Failure is a measurable outcome, and I’ve always been good with DATA. I look at him now, asleep in his chair, and I see a physiological shell. The man who taught me how to read the DSM-III is gone, replaced by a biological process that is slowly turning my life into a series of hazardous incidents. I will pack his bags on Monday. I will tell him we are going for a drive. I will sign the intake forms with my professional pen, the one I got for twenty-five years of service. I am choosing my own sanity over a promise made in a moment of arrogance, and if that makes me a MONSTER in the eyes of my younger self, then so be it... I just want the noise to stop.