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.

If my daughter had ever had a period, I didn’t know about it. It was one of those things that as a father I was to know about and happily be unaware of. Here I was wiping my baby girl’s vagina while wiping away evidence of her womanhood. I didn’t know what to do. There were no pads within view in her bathroom, so I folded toilet paper until thick and pushed it against her and got some underwear on her. After I had pulled up her pajama bottoms and flushed the toilet, she looked at me and smiled.

“Are you all right?” she asked, sounding surprisingly collected.

“I’m fine,” I said. “What about some breakfast?”

“That would be nice.” Again, she sounded decidedly older, different from the little girl I remembered, and still there was no reason for me to assume she knew who I was.