But, the Day Came

It’s all for the best,’ sighs 85-year-old Arlene Higgins, a widow and Nebraska farmer who can scarcely disguise her sorrow in placing her strongwilled 92-year-old brother, Clarence Keyser, into a nursing home. She’s been cautioned that members of her family can no longer manage his care without compromising both Clarence’s health and their own. Clarence’s only daughter, Donna, confesses, ‘My husband and I said we would never put him in a rest home, but the day came.’ Begun as a chronicling of a man’s life in productive old age, But the day came speaks of what it means to lose one’s homestead, one’s fragile hold on the past, and, to use Arlene’s words, one’s reason for living.