My relationship with my father was troubled and ambivalent, but a few years ago, when I learned his health was failing fast, I knew I had to see him. My kids felt the same way. They hadn’t seen him in years, but still, he was their grandfather. They needed to say goodbye while he could still know who they were. With every phone conversation, he asked: When will I see those girls?

There was only one problem. Father was in Denver and we were in North Carolina. Funds were tight. No way I could afford three airline tickets. My old car, with more than 200,000 miles on the odometer, didn’t seem reliable enough for the journey. I did what I suspect a lot of families would do under similar circumstances. I rented a car and put it on my credit card.

We made the long journey through the mountains and the flat plains, staying at the cheapest motel we could find. We arrived in Denver and found a weakened but still fierce old man, overjoyed at the sight of his two beautiful granddaughters.

We stayed a couple of days and held a belated 92nd birthday party for him. We gave him a soft velour blanket to warm his legs. We listened to him recite his favorite poetry. On our last day, we arrived to find him curled fetally on his bed, troubled and scared. He clung hard to the kids’ arms, refusing to release them. That scared them, in turn.

“I don’t know what to do,” he kept saying.

I motioned them into chairs and sat on his bed, holding him. “It’s OK,” I told him. “You don’t have to do anything. You can let go now.” I held him close, just as I had done through long years with frightened children. He began to relax. I kept telling him it was all right. I looked over at my kids. Tears were falling down their faces.

Turning to Father, I put my face close and from the bottom of my memory I began to hum a tune. It was a lullaby he had written for me when I was a baby, still an innocent delight to him, before the complications of our warring natures jangled things up. Only two people in the whole world knew that tune: Father and me. As I hummed, I felt his grip soften on my arm. I stayed there, still, until his breathing evened out and his eyes closed and he slept. Then I slowly disengaged myself and we slipped away.

He died a couple of months later, after a rally or two.

I maxed out that credit card to get us across the country. It took me months and months to pay it off. If I had lost my job, or if some other emergency had come up in those months, I don’t know what we would have done.

I suspect that these are the kinds of stories behind a lot of the cases in bankruptcy courts across the country. Many of them are the result of credit card debt, so it’s easy to paint the debtors as heedless spenders intent on the latest consumer goodies. But add up the number of cases that result from medical expenses (hospitals and doctors’ offices all take credit cards now) and then tack on the indescribable situations like ours that summer, and you’ve got a different picture.

In a perfect world we would all have savings set aside for such emergencies. But a lot of us don’t have perfect families. Some are single moms like me, living paycheck to paycheck; others are families in which the main breadwinner has been laid off, or stricken by illness, or had to take off work to care for a family member.

All of a sudden, an income isn’t there. But the credit card is still in your wallet. Your kids get sick or hungry, you’re going to use it, whether at the grocery store or the clinic or the gas station, hoping against hope that somehow, some way, you’ll be able to pay. You say a little prayer and slide it through the slot.

But maybe you don’t find work. Maybe you can’t because your husband just gets sicker. Finally you take a cold look and realize there’s no way you can pay all you owe.

Most of those people who end up in this place are proud and want to do the right thing. But, driven to the wall, sometimes they need that safety net.

The legislation now making its way to President Bush’s desk will shrink that safety net considerably. They’re doing it because the credit card companies hate it when people are allowed to cancel their debts. Those companies have spent huge amounts of money and time lobbying for tighter requirements for Chapter 7, the part of the law that allows people to get out from under their bills.

But those companies are not starving. The one that issued my card, which is also one of the country’s biggest, Capital One Financial, reported an increase in profits of 28 percent last year. A study by researchers at Harvard University found that credit card company profits had risen by 163 percent over the past five years. That’s a whole lot better than my household is doing. How about yours?

Medical bills account for about half of all bankruptcies, according to the study. One of its authors, Dr. David Himmelstein, put it this way: “Unless you’re Bill Gates, you’re just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.”

Or one lost job, or one dying father.

Susanna Rodell is editorial-page editor of The Charleston Gazette. Her e-mail address is srodell@wvgazette.com.