Not many of his village had escaped, but he had, and he’d made every moment count. He’d become a tailor—a trade his mother had taught him as a young boy—and built a small chain of combination dry cleaner and tailor shops. He’d met his wife in Houston, after he’d been injured at a Custom Tailors & Designers Association convention. A drunken attendee had bowled him over from behind, driving him headfirst into the corner of a display booth and splitting his head open. His wife had been a triage nurse at St. Joseph Medical Center, and he’d been overwhelmed at the sight of her, unable to breathe or speak. He’d pretended it was the head wound, but she knew, and she’d felt the instant attraction as well.

Decades later, with two beautiful and talented children—a professor of American history, which amused Esli as an immigrant, and an incredibly successful investment banker—his wife had succumbed to cancer, and Esli found himself struggling to get through the days on his own. He’d thought it was just the grief, the painful hole in his heart that had been wrenched open, physically manifesting itself in insidious ways. But he wasn’t that lucky. A doctor’s visit had resulted in a battery of tests and a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. As soon as he’d told his son Stephen, the banker, there was little to no discussion, and Esli found himself living in a luxurious guest bedroom with his son, his wife, and their two children.

While most Americans might have paused at the prospect of taking care of an ill parent, that was not the way of his son, who knew the full story of Esli’s childhood—the grandchildren would learn it when they were older—and his wife had supported the decision completely. Three years later, he’d fully assimilated into the daily life cycle of the family, playing with his grandchildren, helping when he could—no one could fix a tear or handcraft a princess costume better than Grandpa Esli—and trying to minimize the burden that he felt he placed upon them. He knew his family didn’t view him through that lens, but the helplessness and confusion that came with Alzheimer’s made him feel that way.

In recent months, the symptoms had grown worse—the forgetting, the wandering, the in-between, where he thought he was in a dream but was physically manifesting it in reality. The last was the most terrifying, for it was after those fugue states where he would find himself in another part of the house than he last remembered being, the journey a black hole of lost memories.