Phil ran his fingers over the name of the groom and tried to remember when he last saw Matt Fee. Phil had few memories of Barb’s family, even though they were so important to his mother. He wondered if he’d blocked them out.

Now that he was older, he realized that Barb was probably his mother’s only outlet for adult communication during his father’s last years. Phil was just a kid when his father was diagnosed with the disease that eventually killed him, something that his brother explained to strangers as “not quite Parkinson’s, not quite Lou Gehrig’s.”

The disease was not quite anything, from what Phil could remember. It was a dark fog that took over his father’s brain and robbed him of his ability to write, walk, and, eventually, breathe.

At first Nancy, Phil, and Phil’s brother, Mickey, assumed that the often-grumpy and wisecracking patriarch of their family was simply depressed. Frank had become increasingly reserved and quiet, but they attributed it to the loss of his own mother, who had died the previous year.

Eventually Nancy confronted Frank about his prolonged gloom. His answer was frightening. “I think I’m not well,” was all he’d told her, as a tear rolled down his right cheek.

Within a week, they were at the hospital for scans and consults. Within a month, there was a diagnosis.

“It’s called frontotemporal dementia,” Nancy told her sons, who sat on the family’s floral couch with their heads down. Frank was there too. He was in his favorite leather reclining chair, staring out the window.

The progression of the disease was actually rather slow, which Phil secretly resented. If Frank had died quickly, if he’d lost his capacities within a year, Nancy wouldn’t have lost her forties tending to a sick man who went from being angry to vegetative over the course of six very long years. It seemed like it would go on forever, and Nancy kept him by her side for as long as she could.

That was Phil’s most significant memory of Nancy’s friend Barb Fee—what she said to his mother the night she realized she would have to put her husband into a home.

Phil was on his way from his bedroom to his living room to watch television, when he overheard Barb and Nancy whispering. He listened, hidden in the shadows of the hallway.

“You can’t take care of him anymore,” Barb had said softly. “You’ve been an angel. You’ve done him right. But this is beyond you and it’s bad for the boys. It’s time to bring him to a rehab facility, Nancy.”

“No,” Nancy had said unconvincingly. “Not yet.”

“You’re going to do it, and I’ll help you.”

Phil heard his mother let out a sob. Usually she cried inaudibly, her eyes welling with tears as she spoke clearly. But this was a real release punctuated with whimpers and hiccups.

Nancy heaved as she tried to take a breath. Phil squatted as quietly as he could and hugged his knees with his arms as he tried to keep himself from letting out his own sobs. He knew that his tears weren’t about his father, who snored loudly in the bedroom next to his. It had been more than a year since he’d accepted the fact that he’d lost the dad he’d known as a kid. But he mourned for his mother, Nancy the saint. Life should have been easier for her, but she’d been saddled with an unfortunate circumstance. And soon Phil would leave her to go to college. And Barb, who had quickly become Nancy’s best friend, had plans to move back to Raleigh. Phil’s mom would be alone.