05/04/2026
Some of you know that I watched my father suffer for some time. A stroke pulled him deep into Alzheimer's several years ago, and what followed was the slow unraveling that only those who have witnessed truly understand — watching someone you have known your whole life become a stranger to the world, and to themselves.
What made it harder still was knowing how much he would have hated it. My father was a man of independence, of control, of dignity expressed through capability. To see him in memory care — dependent on strangers for the most basic things, stripped of the autonomy that had defined him his entire life, the slow erasure of everything he had built himself to be — was its own particular grief.
He was proud in the way men of his generation were proud — privately, fiercely, without complaint. He never would have wanted this. Not any of it. And holding that knowledge while also holding his hand was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
There is a strange mercy in Alzheimer's gradual nature. Grief spread thin across years teaches you to let go in pieces. And though my heart is relieved that he finally found his peace, I still ache for one more conversation with him — one where he would have known it was me.
It’s humbling and heart-wrenching all at once.
I know that losing a parent is something many people face. But living it yourself, somehow makes it feel like the most singular event in the universe. As though grief invented itself just for this moment.
I love my father. I hold him with an open heart now — the man I knew, and the man I didn't. I am grateful for every decade we were given together, complicated and beautiful and unfinished as they were.
Rest now, Dad. You've earned the stillness. I hope wherever you are, the water is calm and the fish are biting.
