It was a bitter morning in San Francisco when it happened, mist rising above the city like a ghostly dragon’s wing. My father woke up, looked at the grainy picture of me on the nightstand—a picture he had taken himself, with one of those cheap disposable cameras—and for several minutes, he could not recognize my face. My mother watched quietly, her lips pressed into a grim line.

It was not in my mother’s nature to be soft, but for me, she tried her best todiminish the magnitude of the incident. “It just took a moment,” she said on thephone, “Just a moment, alright? Nothing to write home about.” But I was in no mood for white lies: until then, my father had forgotten many things—friends and car keys and gas stoves—but never something like this. A part of me had known it would come eventually, that an illness like his didn’t discriminate when it came to eating away the brain; I’d seen his MRI with my own eyes, the deep sulci and signs of atrophy. But lulled in part by desperation, in part by hubris, I’d genuinely believed I could be immune from his forgetting spells.

I was in New York when I received my mother’s call, and I remember walking by the park, feeling as if the entire world had shifted several degrees. I was unmoored, lost, and for a moment I wondered if this was what my father had felt several decades ago when he fled Vietnam, sitting in that little boat and watching as his motherland grew further and further away, until it was just a line, and then a vestigial phantom in his memory.

Back then I kept a small notebook of my father’s Firsts—first time he got lost at the mall, first time he forgot a particular memory, a particular face—and when I sat down on a cold park bench to record that next entry, the pen trembled no matter how hard I tried to steady my hand. On the page, my words took on a leftward slant, as if they couldn’t bear to march forward. I kept imagining his face under pale light, the way his lips must have stumbled, then stalled. How my mother would have squeezed his shoulder in pity, eventually saying, Bella, it’s Bella.

It had snowed all week, and as I stared out at solemn trees whose branches were so frosted they looked like they carried blossoms, I recall trying to will the world to stop turning. For a fraction of a second, I could almost believe it had worked—that I’d elongated the seconds, delayed what was to come. The wind died down, and it was silent, a rare feat in New York. No car horns, no birds.

For a moment, I was certain I had defied physics.

But just as quickly, a little boy with orange boots appeared in the periphery of my vision, cracking the surface of that perfect illusion wide open, as if he’d taken an ice pick to a frozen lake. He ran into the clearing, building a little snowman and intermittently engaging in a snowball fight with his mother. I was so distraught that real anger, white-hot and painful, rose in my chest. It took several deep breaths to dissipate that strange tightness, after which I rubbed warmth back into my hands and returned to the Book of Firsts.

When I finished writing down what had transpired, I looked up just in time to see the boy trip over his shoelaces. His face was bright red when he got up; his eyes were glassy and wide, as if they held a river of tears just on the precipice of spilling over. I expected him to cry—in a way, I wished for it—but to my dismay, he began to laugh with the full force of his body. His mother, a few feet away, tenderly brushed away the snow from his ruddy cheeks and his coat. She ruffled his hair; he laughed again. The sound was light, happy. It expanded and, at once, was everywhere.

X

To this day, I am still somewhat disturbed I sat there waiting for a little boy to devolve into tears. I suspect it was because I’d wanted some confirmation that the world was, indiscriminately, a terrible place. It dealt us all blows here and there, and my father forgetting me was simply one of those things.

Years later, I thought of something else. The boy running around, making his snowman, reminded me of all those times my father and I used to build makeshift fortresses in the living room. See, I was an only child, and my father, quite non-traditionally, the homemaker. In early grade school, I used to force him to help me arrange the pillows and blankets, then would pull him into some fantasy world where I was (usually) a princess, and he a knight or king. Sometimes an evil dragon, if I wanted someone to throw pillows at.

“Again?” he used to say, exasperated, when I pointed to a newly-constructed fort.

“Again,” I would reply, before launching into detailed instructions on hisrole for the day.

It made me think—when had we stopped? A pit of loss opened in front of me, knowing that at one point making this fortress with my father was all I’d cared about, and then one morning, for no reason at all, except, perhaps, the passage of time, I woke up and never thought to build it together with him again. Just like that, I’d forgotten that private world of ours. Just as my father woke up one morning and forgot my face, which in so many ways was his own.

And so it is in life—that we forget each other in turns, and on occasion we remember.

Daria Hoang, MS4
Saint Louis University School of Medicine