I had been away from home for a couple of weeks, but the strangeness of the house upon my return caused me to feel as if I had been gone for years. Like a coward sidling back onto a battlefield, I found all that I expected but cast in unfamiliar light, with unfamiliar and strange shadows. When I saw Meg’s face, I wondered if she would ever again speak to me, but she did, her compassion, her love allowing her to understand that the grief I was experiencing was no less deep and intense than hers, that we each had to cope in our own way. My leaving, however, had cheated her out of an opportunity to run away as I had, to hide from the world that had been given to us.

She put to me a reasonable-enough question. “Where were you?”

“I told you, I was in New Mexico.”

“What were you doing?”

I answered truthfully. “I don’t know.”

She nodded.

“Is Sarah asleep?”

“Yes. She went down easily.”

“Has she asked for me?”

“No.” That simple answer crushed me, but a yes would have been equally as devastating.

“Seizures?”

“A couple every day. There was a pretty severe one two days ago. Otherwise they’ve been mild. Spacing out.” Meg began to cry.

I sat with her on the sofa, held her. We softened to each other in a way that we had not for some time.

Unusually progressive. That was how Dr. Gurewich characterized my daughter’s condition. It sounded like a description of a private school. Unusually progressive. It was so much like falling. “Rapidly progressive dementia,” Gurewich called it, sounding more distant and detached each time we consulted with her. Sarah hadn’t known there was a ledge, and with just a few steps she was gone. But she was also there, present with me, in time and in space, in the same body, asleep at that moment while I sat in the chair beside her bed. Morning was just coming on, her shade up to allow the new light in. She was still beautiful, as she would forever be. She awoke and she recognized that it was morning, but there was nothing to indicate that she recognized me, yet she didn’t recoil as if I were a stranger. She let me guide her to the bathroom. I stood with my back to her while she sat on the toilet and peed. The sound of her urine stopped, and I heard her frustration with the toilet paper. I turned to see her fumbling with the roll; she could not tear it off and hold it. I called out for Meg and then remembered she had gone out to yoga, finally some time for herself. The nurse had not yet arrived. Sarah looked at me, perhaps asking for help. I tore off some paper and wiped my daughter’s vagina. When she was an infant, I changed her diaper so many times, being certain to dry inside her little creases. She didn’t have a vagina then, not really, but now she was no infant. I had never felt so awkward, so scared, so inappropriate in my life, and yet I was performing this most intimate action for my dearest person. To feel so close to her while feeling so strange and weirdly guilty was confusing and disorienting. I happened to look at the tissue before tossing it into the bowl. The paper was tinged pink.