Why I Wrote Held in the Vanishing

There is a particular silence that settles into a house where someone is forgetting. It isn’t empty. It’s full of the things that used to be said and now aren’t — the names, the stories told at the same point in every dinner, the small corrections. I lived inside that silence for the better part of six years, first with my father and then, before we had finished grieving him, with my mother.

I started writing because I was afraid. Not of the disease, though I was afraid of that too, but of the way it was rewriting them in front of me. Dementia doesn’t take a person all at once. It takes them in increments so small you can almost convince yourself you imagined the loss.

I wanted to hold the version of them that was still here, even as I learned to love the version that was arriving.

So I kept notebooks. On the backs of pharmacy receipts, in the margins of appointment cards, on my phone at three in the morning. Held in the Vanishing grew out of those scraps — a memoir, yes, but really a record of attention. A way of saying: I was here. I saw you. You were not alone in it, and neither was I.

If you are somewhere in the middle of your own long goodbye, I wrote this for you. I’ve gathered some of the resources that steadied me on the book page — the practical things no one hands you at the diagnosis.