No Longer Mine

Saturday evening, August 8, 2026, Held in the Vanishing was no longer mine.

I’m not sure I was prepared for how that would feel.

These words lived mostly in my journal. They were written in the quiet hours when I couldn’t sleep, when my heart hurt, when I was angry or afraid or exhausted, when I was trying to understand what was happening to my parents—and what was happening to me as I watched them slowly disappear.

There was no book in mind.

There was certainly no room full of people.

There was just me, my journal, and whatever needed to come out of me that day.

And then that evening, I looked around a room filled with 50 or so people I love—family and friends from so many different chapters of my life—and realized they were there because those private words had somehow become a book.

My book.

That still feels strange to say.

I stood in front of them and read from a chapter called “Still Here With Me.”

So much of Held in the Vanishing is about what dementia takes from us slowly and relentlessly. Words. Memories. Familiar ways of being together. Pieces of the people we have always known.

But “Still Here With Me” is about what remains.

My parents are still here with me.

Not in all the ways I want them to be. Not in all the ways they once were. But they are here.

Standing in that room, I could feel the distance between the woman who first opened her journal because she didn’t know what else to do with everything she was feeling and the woman standing there holding a published book in her hands.

They were both me.

Afterward, I signed books. I hugged people. I laughed. I cried. I drank an Aperol spritz (or two).

And I felt very, very loved.

Friends traveled from out of town and out of state. People helped before the party and stayed afterward. They bought books, asked me to sign them, and hugged me when words weren’t necessary.

But it wasn’t really the party that moved me.

It was the presence.

People from so many different parts of my life standing together.

For me.

For this story.

For my parents.

For six years, I held these words close because I needed them. Now I’m letting them go because maybe someone else needs them, too.

And I discovered that when you finally loosen your grip on something you have held for so long, you don’t necessarily fall.

Sometimes, other people are there to hold you. ❤️