I felt a little left out when I saw the pictures in the Gazette a couple of weeks ago of Vineyarders together watching the Presidential inauguration. A world away in Westchester, N.Y., I had spent that morning moving my father into an Alzheimer’s lock-down unit, euphemistically known as an “assisted-living residence for the memory impaired.”

I have the best chocolate cake recipe. Besides five squares of chocolate, it calls for brown sugar, sour cream and hot coffee. I have made it every year for my husband’s birthday and, once or twice I think, even for my own.

What I didn’t tell you as you waved to me from the ferry that early September morning and left me, literally, watching from the pier, was that I was overwhelmed with a wave of grief the likes of which I first felt only after my mother died.