The Father

Alzheimer and seeks to find in the consolation of words a place to keep memories alive through those everyday things that weave us as people.

Shared Birthday

Tomorrow is your birthday. Your real one, from your birth—not from your diagnosis. Alzheimer’s, the doctor said; disease of forgetting, I say; unbearable, others say.

I bought your favorite cake, the one you taste every year as if it were the first time and say it could perfectly become your favorite cake. I’ll make you shrimp rice with your own recipe, and you’ll say its flavor makes you think of something you no longer remember.

The most painful part of watching you escape through the cracks of memory is going with you. I try to cling to you to save myself from falling into the dark wells of your silence and I watch you fade, staring fixedly at a clock’s second hand that sometimes marks any old o’clock and other times the lucidity of eight twenty-seven.

I write to you so I don’t forget I’m your daughter, even though you no longer remember me and I’m just a stranger living in your house. I write to keep myself safe from the place where everything lacks a name, where past and present become alphabet soup with the flavor of riddles.

Happy birthday, Dad. It’s also my birthday. When they sing to us in front of our favorite cake you’ll say: well, what a coincidence; and I’ll blow out the candles wishing that at least one more time you’ll remember me and before sleeping you’ll say: God bless you, mija, until tomorrow; and that in that tomorrow you won’t leave again.