I woke up at around 2:30 in the morning to a pounding against one of the walls downstairs. I was becoming used to it by now, but predicting the exact moment was impossible. Sometimes earlier, sometimes later. I had stopped asking when long ago, just as I had stopped asking why.
“Help me!” the voice called out, rolling me out of bed instantly, my right foot landing onto a roach that had been scurrying about in the middle of the night. You don’t have to see something like that to know what you’re stepping on. It’s like a cross between a piece of popcorn and Fresh-up chewing gum that was popular in the eighties. An unpleasant crunch and squirt happening all at once.
“Help me!”
I didn’t have any time to think about the roach guts glued to the sole of my foot. Her cries were always hard to hear, like a child calling out for its mom. I was the mom. And I was also the dad, the son, the brother, and the constant energy that needed to harness more energy from some external force to save her every night.
I was never half awake, half asleep, or half of anything. I was just a body and mind in motion, running down the stairs, careful on the bottom landing not to twist my ankle again like I had two weeks ago. By now, the pain had alleviated, but the sensation in my foot would never be completely intact. I had read how ankle sprains did that to people, so I had to be extra careful about that bottom landing, thinking ahead as always while trying not to get lost in the moment.
“Somebody!” she cried out again.
Before even opening the bedroom door, I knew what I was in for. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, tangled in the sheet and pile of blankets, a look of panicked distress aging her another ten years. On other occasions, mom didn’t even look close to seventy. Her hair was still honey-colored with only a few streaks of random gray, and I believe I already had more wrinkles than she ever would. Her skin was still smooth and soft to touch, practically flawless for a seventy-two-year-old. Time wasn’t leaving wrinkles on her skin, but it was definitely leaving wrinkles inside of her mind.
“You’re okay, mom,” I quietly promised her.
Sometimes I wasn’t always quiet. I’d get louder, my patience slipping as a snark of irritation slipped out. I knew better, but at two or three o’clock in the morning, I think most people would feel at least slightly irritated. It’s like the parent waking in the middle of the night when his son or daughter cries out because of a nightmare or an unfamiliar shadow emerging from the corner of the bedroom—the child’s imagination unable to leap back into reality. As the parent, you get up and go. You take care of your young, whether the shadows or nightmares are actually there or not. Likewise, it was my duty to take care of my young-old.
“Stand up, mom,” I directed her, reaching down for her to hold onto me.
She laced her skinny fingers around my hands, still unsure of what to do next. I repeated the directions, same simple words with no fillers. I knew less was always more.
She finally stood up, still crouching, her spine arching into a parabola as Earth’s gravity tried to pull everything down. My opposite hand gently braced against her sternum, palm side giving just enough pressure to lift her up into extension. Her contralateral arm immediately elevated into a high-guard position. I stood by her side, still holding her soft bony hand, and then I gave the next basic command.
“Let’s walk up here,” I said.
She shuffled her feet with me leading the way around to the side of the bed and up toward the head. Fortunately, the sheets were still dry. She had gotten up on her own, made it to the bathroom, and initiated getting herself back to bed. But going back was always the stuck-point. There was never a side of the bed, foot of the bed, or head. It was just bed, and wherever she felt it with her hands, her body landed, usually at the foot where it was impossible for someone with such poor motor planning to lie back down.
“Turn around,” my hands guided her pelvis toward her right side and slightly backwards until she was safely positioned to sit.
“Now, sit down,” I added.
After a slight delay, she eased herself down, my hand still guiding hers onto the edge of the bed. I gave her the water-cup that was sitting on the nightstand. Her hands trembled as she held onto it, like someone tenaciously grasping for a better moment of the memory-slipped past. She took a few sips and handed it back to me. She was calmer now.
“Lie down, mom,” I coached her through the next step.
She heaved both legs back onto the bed as her thin upper body reclined back, her head cradling the pillow. Her hands immediately latched onto her nightshirt, pulling it above her waist, exposing the clean pair of briefs I had put on her before bedtime that evening.
“This thing,” she fidgeted with the shirt, “it gets me in the way.”
She would always do this a few times until it felt less tangled. She had similar reactions to things touching her feet. She wore socks to bed because her feet would always get too cold, but she never wanted the bed covers touching. Too heavy. Everything on her usually felt too heavy. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t moving as swiftly, her shuffling feet barely advancing forward as if they were glued to the floor, her forward-flexed posture unable to lengthen.
When I finally helped her reposition the shirt where it wasn’t bothering her, she became calmer. I tucked her into bed, kissed her on the cheek, and told her I loved her. I knew there would eventually come a morning when she wouldn’t know that. In the meantime, I figured those words could never be spoken too much.
Right after our dad died, I knew things were going to be quite different for mom, but I never would’ve imagined her losing her mind, especially at her age. I had wrongly assumed that dementia only affected people much older. My sister and I were actually seeing signs in her early sixties. In fact, when she started talking about the changes at work that were becoming harder for her to keep up with, I knew something was wrong, I just wasn’t quite sure what. That was around the same time our dad was becoming sick, his liver failing after years of excess alcohol and prescriptive meds. I think we just linked the changes with our mom to stress and general depression.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Jordan,” I remember her telling me one afternoon while we chatted over a cup of coffee. “I can barely remember something as basic as the six trig functions lately, let alone where I parked the car when I go to the store.”
Coming from most anyone else, remembering the six trig functions wouldn’t have seemed basic, but for a woman who had taught high school math classes for over thirty years, it was like losing a body part. Math wasn’t just my mom’s career, it was one of her passions amongst others, such as attending yoga classes at the YMCA, painting, and volunteering every week at her church. She was starting to lose some of those passions when dad got really sick, but not her math. Not her precious trig functions.
“Maybe you should see a counselor,” I suggested as I watched her stir her cup of coffee, her spoon circling the mug several times.
“What good would that really do?” she asked, rolling her eyes over my suggestion. “It’s not going to give your dad a new liver.”
“It’s not about dad,” I told her. “It’s about keeping you healthy.”
“I am healthy.”
The funny thing is, she really was, at least physically. She kept her weight mostly in the 120’s, had no history of hypertension or other cardiac problems, ate healthy, never smoked, and only had a glass or two of red wine a few nights every week. She did what every doctor wishes their patients would do: she heeded their advice and took care of herself, up until a certain point that is.
“I think you know what I mean,” I added, knowing that I was touching on one of the sore spots of her heart’s denial.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said.
“But if I don’t, you’re not.”
She suddenly rose from the high-back chair, picked up her half empty coffee cup, and quickly walked away from the dining table, turning her back on me in an offensive manner. I know she didn’t mean it to come across like that, but it was her way of evading her own problems, her way of refusing to believe that constantly running after my dad’s needs was eroding her own health.
“You want to do me a favor?” she asked, her back still turned on me as she stood at the sink rinsing out the coffee cup.
“Of course,” I replied, hoping her request would actually benefit her and not pertain to someone else’s needs.
“I have to take your dad to a new doctor tomorrow,” she informed me, immediately crushing my hopes. I’m not really sure what I was expecting. Maybe a request for a gift card to the spa or massage parlor, just a little bit of free time to herself to enjoy. Quite the contrary.
“You want me to take him?” I offered, wondering if she’d cave in and let me.
“No, I need to be there with him,” she stubbornly refused. “I just want you to ride with me to the office, so I know exactly where we need to go on the day of the appointment.”
“Ride with you right now?” I asked, a bit caught off guard over her extemporaneous request.
She turned around to face me, still standing by the kitchen sink as she dried her hands with a towel.
“Do you mind?” she asked again, seeming a bit frustrated that I wasn’t jumping up right away with the car keys ready to go in one hand.
“No, it’s cool,” I said as I took one more sip of coffee, realizing that it was twice as strong as the coffee she used to make.
Even though I think she wanted me to do the driving, I strongly encouraged her to get behind the wheel. At this point, I had noticed her disinterest in wanting to drive over the past year. She preferred being the passenger, the one who could sit back and not worry about quick reaction times or other vehicles whizzing around her when she drove slowly, anxious with both hands mounted at 10 and 2 o’clock, gripping the steering-wheel with all her might.
I punched in the address on my GPS, and I noticed mom looking over at me, somewhat annoyed by the newer piece of technology in my hand. Whenever something new came along, it made her so nervous, you would think she was getting ready to set for a board exam, like her entire life depended on these new gadgets that kept popping up everywhere. It’s one of the reasons she retired from the school system a little early. The push for technology was just a little too much of a push for her to embrace, so she took the easy way out, feeling at the same time forced out of her role.
“I don’t understand all those gadgets,” she uttered as she started the ignition.
“You don’t have to,” I assured her, “just go where I tell you to.”
“How do you know that’s right anyway?” she remarked, looking over her shoulder as she backed the car out of the driveway.
“It’s easier than reading a map,” I said, recalling all those family vacations we took during the summers and the times when my dad would pull into a gas station to decipher a physical roadmap. Half the time he’d end up going into the station to ask someone for directions, which were usually only half-ass correct, resulting in us getting even more lost.
“I’m not sure about that,” she replied with a touch of sass as her Ford Focus puttered up the road.
I intermittently watched the GPS for any directions where we needed to turn, change lanes, or re-route. My mom was spot-on about one thing: they weren’t always the most reliable inventions when it came to pathfinding. That was her way of putting things. Getting from one place to another was simply an act of finding one’s path. It was almost instinctual despite any wrong turns or other bumps in the road. It was like arithmetic, as she would say. You could stare a problem to death or just jump right in, trying one formula, grouping a few items together, subtracting and adding from one end to another, until you thought you had exhausted all options. But it was usually that last option that gave you the solution—that left-handed turn at the end of the lane that brought you from the middle-of-nowhere to where you needed to be. That’s how numbers sometimes worked. That’s how pathfinding sometimes carried you to where you wanted to be.
Eventually, the GPS stopped us at a parking lot that had lots of potholes and an old brick office building with rust-red shutters on its uncleaned windows. The shrubs outside the building were beyond overgrown, crawling about halfway up the dirty windows, in desperate need of pruning. This happened to be on a Sunday, so no one else was around.
“I want to find the main entrance,” my mom insisted, a comment that immediately puzzled me.
“Well, it’s not a very big building,” I said, “so that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I just need to see,” she snapped at me while getting out of the car.
Seemingly little things were starting to push her to the edge. I’ll reiterate that they seemed like little things, knowing how much self-perception always factors into our manners of navigating the world. Everything was starting to be perceived as a big ordeal to her.
I waited in the car, the only one setting in the lot, as she sauntered up to the front entrance, approaching it cautiously, looking from one side to the other. I watched her walk up to the main entrance, and for whatever reason, she looked through the glass door, trying to see the inside. I’m not sure what she was expecting to find, maybe nothing. It might’ve just been her desire to prepare her mind for an appointment that probably wasn’t going to end in good news. Our dad surely wasn’t getting any better, but I didn’t realize how much it was wearing our mom down.
I didn’t realize it until that moment happened.
She turned around to make her way back to the car, but instead of coming straight back to where I had parked, she wandered off to a completely opposite direction, pausing and looking around, unaware that I was in the same spot where I had been less than five minutes ago. At first, I just gave her a little bit of time, convinced that her pathfinding skills would catch up once she was reoriented to these unfamiliar surroundings. After all, the sun was shining pretty brightly that day, so I imagined there could’ve been a glare that was blinding the path. But then she kept walking farther away, moving slowly with hesitation, taking steps that didn’t trust the next ones ahead. She stopped again and called out my name. I rolled the window down and shouted back. She heard my voice, but there was still a delay with her finding me. I shouted again and waved my arm out the window, and this finally seemed to work. She picked up her pace and started to walk in the right direction to where I was waiting, trying not to look worried.
“All this sun must be getting to me,” she guffawed as she climbed back into the driver’s seat, nonchalantly brushing off the incident.
I didn’t say anything, knowing that it wasn’t normal for anyone to get lost in an empty parking lot. We got back on the main road, and I stared down at my GPS as it kept re-routing, apparently just as thrown off as my mom had been in the parking lot. I turned the damn thing off, knowing that I could easily get us back home from there. But then I felt a startle panic over the idea of someday not being able to, the idea of no longer being able to be a pathfinder. I wondered if that’s what she had felt earlier; I wondered if her moment of not being able to navigate through such a simple environment had caused that same feeling.
After our dad died, mom was left with a mostly empty house. Our father’s ghost always seemed to linger in the background. That statement is not just a metaphor, by the way. The first year after his death, I thought we were all going crazy. Whenever my sister or I were there visiting, we’d hear doors opening and closing from upstairs, and the upstairs floor would creak like footsteps walking across its old hardwood. Mom was always right there with us, reassuring us that it was him.
“Someone as stubborn as your father,” she’d say, “isn’t leaving this world so easily, dead or not.”
I didn’t believe the ghost-talk at first. With her now more frequent memory-slips, I was certainly afraid mom was losing part of her mind, but dementia still didn’t occur to me. I was more worried about her isolation and depression, a concoction that seemed like the perfect formula for madness.
“Mom, that’s just the house,” I tried to convince her.
I remembered from years ago how noisy things could get in older homes. I just assumed the occasional draft would creep along and close a door or two. Or on days when it was windier than usual, the floors would creak like someone else besides us walking from room to room.
“Oh no,” she’d say with a grin on her face, “it’s him still hanging around.”
My sister told me it was her way of coping. Mom wasn’t in denial that he was dead. She just wasn’t quite ready to let things go, to let his spirit fly away into the great unseen. Maybe it was her way of keeping reigns on a man she could never trust, a man who spent most of his savings on other women, cocktails at the local bar, and used cars. She couldn’t control him when he was alive, so maybe she thought she could in the afterlife.
I’ll admit, my sister’s theory made sense at first, until I started to experience more than just hearing noises throughout the house. I started seeing things as well: coffee cups sliding across the dining room table; picture frames in the living-room falling over for no reason; the refrigerator door in the kitchen swinging wide open; and pieces on the chess board in the den moving all by themselves. That was the same chessboard, by the way, where dad and I used to sit across from each other for hours when I was a kid. Playing chess was at least one good thing he taught me, even though I regretfully lost interest. Needless to say, when all of those things started happening, I knew mom was right. Our dad was still hanging around and not the least bit shy in making us know it.
Maybe our dear Belinda had cursed him, trapping him there in that house for all the mischief he had done, preventing him from crossing the golden bridge to the great unseen. Maybe it was her way of saying, “Sorry, but you’re not getting any peace for all the shit you put me through, not even in the grave!”
Not even in the grave would he let go.
Your mom’s not crazy, Mr. Rayfield. She just has Alzheimer’s.
I won’t ever forget hearing that from the doctor who gave us the official diagnosis. Just Alzheimer’s. That was just as casually put as just a cold or just a little memory loss. There wasn’t anything just about it. A cold or a little memory loss didn’t entail planning ahead for extra caregiver assist or a possible transition into long-term care. It was complicated, far from a just diagnosis.
My mom wasn’t in denial that our father had died, but her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was something she initially denied.
“That doctor is crazy,” she told me on the drive back home that day.
“We could always get a second opinion,” I told her.
I glanced over at her as she stared out the passenger window, her eyes observing the stretch of farmland we had passed several times a week for decades. She furrowed her brow, looking puzzled over the route we were taking.
“Where are we going anyway?” she asked.
“Back home,” I said. “Don’t you remember this way? It’s the same road we took every day to school.”
I realized at that moment, the last thing you should ever say to someone with any type of dementia is, “Don’t you remember?” Of course, the person with it doesn’t remember. That’s one of the hallmarks of the disease. But she was still in the early stages at the time, so she did start to recall something familiar about the road we were driving down.
“Oh yeah,” she somewhat lit up. “I guess I do.”
Or maybe she was just guessing that’s what I wanted to hear. Maybe there wasn’t a trace of remembering where we were going. Maybe it was just all pretend.
Whenever things went missing in the house, mom always blamed it on dad’s wandering spirit. It might’ve been silverware ending up in the refrigerator or a carton of milk hidden away in one of the cabinets. Our noses would just follow the smell in those cases, the worst one being a pack of raw chicken that had gotten shoved into the back of the cereal cabinet. It must’ve remained there for at least three days before I found it one afternoon during one of my after-work visits, the package leaking putrid smelling blood. I’m surprised she couldn’t smell it beforehand; it was so strong I started to gag the moment I opened the cabinet, expecting to find something like a dead rat. It was something dead alright.
“I didn’t put that up there!” mom declared.
“There’s no one else in the house,” I reminded her.
“There absolutely is someone else,” she refuted me.
“If it wasn’t you, then who did it?” I ignored her last remark.
“Who do you think?”
There wasn’t any way to convince her otherwise; she swore it was his ghost causing all the trouble. He was fooling us all and then hanging around in the corners of every room, laughing at us.
“He just wants you and your sister to think I’m losing my mind,” she argued. “Make you think I’m the one misplacing everything. Moving stuff to where it doesn’t belong.”
I might’ve accepted her defenses as the stage of denial people experience when they first realize their short-term memory is slipping. No one would’ve been happy about that. And I know it would’ve been hard for me to accept if I was the one standing there before my own son or daughter, trying to defend myself against something I couldn’t completely fight.
“Look at this if you don’t believe me,” she said while rolling up one of the sleeves on her sweater. “He did this to me last night while I was asleep.”
She showed me four long fingernail scratches tracking along the front part of her forearm.
“You could’ve done that in your sleep, mom,” I tried to reason.
Ghost or no ghost, it wouldn’t have made sense if this was a marking left behind from our father’s spirit because he wasn’t that sort of man. He was full mischief when he was alive, but not the type who would’ve purposefully clawed our mom in her sleep, or anyone for that matter. He could certainly be uncouth, especially with alcohol in him, but never violent.
“I didn’t do this in my sleep, Jordan!” she shook her arm in front of me.
I was getting the old familiar eyeroll by now, communicating that I was wrong. Now, I would’ve kept believing that mom was just creating a different world where dad’s pestering ghost was altering the environment around her, if I hadn’t witnessed what was about to happen.
Just as I was about ready to dismiss everything, the kitchen clock that had been hanging in its same place for over twenty-five years, launched off the wall with such force, it was catapulted across the room, barely missing the two of us and smashing into the dining room China closest. It startled both of us, but definitely me more than mom. She almost seemed satisfied, relieved that something extreme had finally happened with me as a second witness.
“You think it’s just my memory slipping now?” she grinned.
I couldn’t quite process what had just happened as I stood there looking at the broken clock, its turquoise-colored plastic case in several broken pieces, scattered all over the floor. Somehow it was still trying to tick, its bent seconds hand repetitiously flicking but unable to circulate onto the next minute. Despite it being broken, its click seemed louder now, probably because everything else in the room was silent.
“What just happened?” I nervously uttered.
“He’s gotten more of a temper,” she said.
From that point on, I heard things moving around in the house more often, sounds that were more than just the foundation settling or the wind blowing through the cracks and crevices. The sounds of footsteps walking around upstairs became louder, and sometimes I could hear something being dragged across the floor. Whenever I would go upstairs to see where the noises were coming from, the sounds would stop. I told the therapist I was seeing at the time, Dr. Lori Michael, about the noises and the clock that had launched across the kitchen. She didn’t seem too fazed.
“You’re not going crazy,” she assured me. “And I don’t think you’re delusional.”
“I’m really afraid that it’s…”
I went silent, knowing what I wanted to say, but stalling because I didn’t want to admit any of it. I stared at the huge bookcase that was against the wall behind Dr. Michael, volumes of knowledge that explained every known psychological disorder. Off to one side, I focused on a poster with the affirmation that read,
Social isolation is far worse than any cancer.
But letting others in is the greatest of all medicines.
I couldn’t take my eyes away from those words at the moment, realizing that the more my mom’s memory slipped, the more socially isolated she must’ve felt. I wondered if that was partly her reason for holding onto our father’s spirit. I wondered if she was holding on so tenaciously, the yearning was creating a strong energy throughout the house. Enough energy to move things out of place. Enough energy to make a clock fly off the wall, crash, and stop time. Maybe that’s what she needed—something to stop time. Maybe that’s what I needed, too.
“It’s not catching,” Dr. Michael completed my earlier thought, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking it,” I confessed, “but not now.”
“What’s on your mind now?” she asked.
“She was the one who did it,” I said.
“Did what?”
“Threw the clock across the room.”
I closed my eyes and saw the moment as it had really been. I had wanted it just as badly as mom; I had wanted another explanation other than her mind slipping into the cobwebbed corners of time. But that wasn’t the case. She had believed it so much that I was just as equally convinced at first, so much that I had subconsciously forgotten seeing her grab the clock off the wall that day and shatter time. I was seeing through Belinda at that moment, seeing a world that didn’t exist the way it had twenty years ago. It hit me hard, and I tried to choke back the tears. But Dr. Michael told me to let it all go.
“Either right now, Jordan,” she advised, “or later will only make it worse.”
I broke at that moment, still embarrassed, of course. Men weren’t supposed to cry. Stand tall like the strongest tree in the forest, let others lean on you as needed, but don’t ever let the weight break any of your branches. That’s what dad always told me. A strong tree doesn’t bend anywhere, even during a tornado.
It was all rubbish. Seeing someone close to you gradually lose traces of the past was insurmountable to even the strongest tree in the forest.
It’s better to wake up at 2:30 in the morning than to be the guy sleeping in until noon every day. That guy who just doesn’t feel like crawling out of bed is the same one who always complains about never getting anything done. Aside from my duty as a child to parent, I wanted to be there for Belinda, and if that meant starting my days as early as 2:30 in the morning, it was perfectly fine. She was familiar with these surroundings even if she couldn’t navigate from one place to another in the house without me guiding her. The space still meant something to her, even if she couldn’t path find through it alone.
Some days I became an adopted child. Other days I was a distant cousin. For a while, there were still brief moments where I would become her son again, but in a matter of months, those periods dissipated. I was still someone important, someone helpful, and someone who wanted to be there. I was the strong tree standing tall, but my branches sometimes bowed under the pressure.
“Mom, stand up,” I cued her, my hands bracing her hips and gently helping her rock forward.
“Stand here?” she hesitated at first, one arm reaching forward into the emptiness.
“Yes, here,” I confirmed.
She stood up, crouched over until I gave a little nudge against her sternum. Her body extended, but she was still bent, though not as badly. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect even if the math teacher that was still inside of her wanted it to be. But I had also learned when it was best to just go along with things, just be grateful that she could still stand and walk with my assistance. And if it was happening at 2:30 in the morning, I was all the more grateful that it still could.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
We did our little shuffle into the bathroom, her hands holding onto my biceps, my hands still bracing her pelvis for extra security.
“Big, long steps,” I encouraged to lessen the drag and shuffle.
It still wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. We carefully made it into the bathroom, guided by the rows of night-lights I had ordered several months back from an online dealer. They emitted warm blue and green light, our very own pathfinders. I’m still not sure if they really helped, but if anything, they at least softened the mood.
“Back up here,” I directed her to the high-rise commode.
She shuffled backwards, her steps discontinuous but still manageable.
“Pull your underwear down,” I added.
One of her hands shook as she proceeded, a tremor that had started a couple of months ago. But she was still able to use that hand, so I encouraged her to do as much as she could. It’s what she wanted just as much.
“Reach back,” I said while guiding one hand onto the armrest of the elevated commode seat. “Now sit.”
I stepped aside afterwards, giving her some much-deserved privacy. Mind or no mind, I would never want someone hovering over me while I’m trying to piss, so I always backed away or waited outside until she was finished. Before stepping away, I’d always turn the faucet on, allowing some water to trickle into the sink, just in case she was having a hard time going. It seemed to help. But on this particular occasion, mom shouted for me to turn the faucet off.
“You hear?” she asked me.
“Hear what, mom?”
“Shush,” her one finger motioned toward her lips, directing me to be silent. “Listen.”
I listened carefully, at first not hearing anything. I didn’t want to agitate her by admitting that I couldn’t hear whatever she had imagined, so I just kept listening. Then the sound finally came to both of us. It was the sound of those footsteps, walking across the floor upstairs—the sound of footsteps I had once wanted to believe in just as much as mom. Only this time I wasn’t quite sure if I was just falling into Belinda’s world again or actually hearing someone’s feet walking around upstairs.
“It’s him,” she looked up at me, her eyes filled with wonder, like she was reliving one of her better moments. “Your daddy got home from work and didn’t even tell us he was here!”
“That’s dad,” I chuckled, my hands reaching down to help mom off the commode.
“What am I going to do with that man?” she laughed as I helped her clean up.
“Well, I don’t think you can change him,” I said.
“That’s just how he’s going to be,” she smiled.
We shuffled out of the bathroom, returning to her bedroom and back to her bed. I helped her sit back down on the edge of the mattress, gave her a sip of water from her cup, and tucked her in for the remainder of the night. It was a little past three o’clock, and my father’s spirit had quieted down. Belinda didn’t mention anything else about it as her demeanor suddenly shifted.
“Where am I?” she stared up at the ceiling with a panicked look.
My hand caressed hers, and I held onto it.
“You’re in your home,” I told her. “And you’re safe, I promise.”
She started to become calmer, but I still held onto her hand, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t living in the social isolation she internally feared. I promised her that wouldn’t happen. I promised her I’d always be there for her to let me in as part of life’s greatest medicine. If that meant sometimes having to see the world through her eyes, I would embrace the experience. I would be that extra light, that extra pathfinder who would always bring her back to those feelings of safety even through the eyes of uncertainty.
Synapses and Subjects on the Sidelines 