My Father's Dementia

He is my father’s double, an impostor, a thief, a trickster. He steals by the imposition of silence upon a man who was already silent, but in his own way, a silence marked by signs and hesitations, a silence I could read, a silence I could force into a language, the silent language of my father, a language rich in what it withheld, a silence that enclosed, it was like a seed, that asked to be found again and it gave to me the desperate need to find it. But I failed. I never heard those secret words or found the gestures and silences and hesitation and echoes by which I might have inferred them, translated them. My father, I realize now, was asking me to force speech from him, to break open his muteness which was itself some sort of unimaginable spell or curse put upon the line of fathers in my family, going backwards. To force him to speak by inventing what he would speak. But this new silence, the silence of dementia and aphasia, the demented silence of the trickster, I can do nothing with it, it is sterile, absolute in its emptiness and its sense of loss. The trickster looks at me the eyes of my father and shows me in his hurt gaze his disappointment in me, because now I will never make him speak.