I got off the phone with my dad last night, and afterward, I found myself alone in my office—the light off, the air still, my chest tight with the kind of pressure that feels like drowning. I was afraid of how much further he’d declined in the last six months, and the way the disease is dismantling him—slowly and relentlessly. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a deep wave of grief and pain. I started crying, hot, bitter tears flowing down my cheeks—but tears without sound; pain with nowhere to go.

He’s still here. Still living. But we don’t know for how much longer, because Parkinson’s is stealing him away—piece by piece.

We spent twenty-five years at war with each other. And just as we’re starting to finally understand one another, he’s slipping away.

My father was strong and vibrant. He was a builder and a maker—he worked on cars, was a carpenter, a machinist, a foreman at a glass factory. He worked constantly to support me and my sister. Long hours. Hard manual labor.

Now, I see him and he seems small. His arms have shrunk, his face has drawn in. He shuffles hunched over when he walks. He moves slow and awkward. Sometimes his voice cracks, like old asphalt; sometimes it slurs, as slippery as ice. All symptoms of the disease that’s taking him from us.

Between what we’ve lost and what we’re going to lose, in the single moment that is now, I feel my love for my dad and the grief I carry like a heavy backpack—full of everything we’ve shared, everything we hoped to share. The loss of the man he was, and the loss of the future we’d just begun to build together.

I want to be present with him, to stay in the moment, but it’s like the shadow of the inevitable future hangs over everything, coloring every interaction, pulling me back into my grief. Mindfulness feels just out of reach—a dream I once walked in, but can’t enter again. Every time I exist in the present with him, something pulls me out. Small things: buckling his seatbelt for him, steadying him as he walks, watching him struggle to get into the car. These moments invade the present, reminding me of the future hurtling toward us.

In the midst of this grief, the line between past and future blurs, leaving only the present—which feels suspended. I’m stuck between what I’ve already lost and what is yet to come; in a liminal space that offers no comfort. The past is gone, the future promises only more loss. They collapse into each other, and the now slips through my hands like water. Every moment I move forward but never seem to progress, because each new stage of decline renews and sharpens the grief. Time seems to loop around itself—the past, present, and future mingling together in one unbearable ache.

I keep returning to the absurdity of it all—the cruelty. I know the universe is cold and uncaring; I’m an absurdist, after all. But right now, it feels actively malevolent, like it’s deliberately loading me up with pain and whispering, How much more can you bear? How long before you break again? I can’t help but feel a deep bitterness. A rage I thought I’d already burned through.

I turn to my Buddhist teachings for solace—the Five Remembrances, the impermanence of all things—but they feel distant. Abstract. Almost irrelevant in the face of this raw, inescapable grief. The very thing that once gave me perspective—acceptance of the inevitable—is drowned out by the screaming of my heart.

Mindfulness. Meditation. All the practices meant to give perspective, to teach you not to cling—they offer cold comfort when the pain stretches ahead into an unknowable but inevitable future. Impermanence seems far away, just an idea. It’s my memories of him that feel real and present—like anchors in a shifting sea of time.

These memories are small but vivid—fragments of who he was and how he shaped me. I think about the hours we spent in the garage, my father showing me how to work with my hands, trying to pass down what he knew. I didn’t take to the work; cars didn’t interest me. What I remember most is how I earned my first game console: a Super Nintendo we picked out together and paid for piece by piece on layaway.

He had me work with him, handing him tools, loosening bolts, listening to him explain what he was doing. At the end of each week, he’d “pay” me. Each paycheck went toward the SNES at Target. When we finally paid it off, I remember the pride in his face—and how it felt to have earned something. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it brought us closer.

Then we got home and realized the console wasn’t new. The box had been opened; the game cartridge already had save files on it. He was furious. Not at me, or even the store—but at the fact that someone had given his son less than what he’d earned. He went back to Target and raised hell until they gave us a brand-new one off the shelf. He wasn’t trying to teach me a lesson. But I learned anyway—about fairness, about standing up, and about fighting for the people you love.

That’s who my dad was. Fiercely protective. Unafraid to confront when needed. Determined to pass on the value of knowledge, and of work. He fought for me in school, too, when my behavioral challenges and high-end test scores didn’t line up. He confronted teachers and administrators, demanded evaluations and accommodations, drafted my IEP by hand.

His mind is still sharp. His wit and intelligence still shine through, though they seem to flicker now—like sunlight through tree branches, like a flashlight against dirty steel, like a candle in the dark. His body is failing him, inch by inch—but his mind, so far, is untouched. The truth, though, is that we don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know how fast the decline will move, or how far it will go. Only that it will.

And I can’t make sense of it. Can’t categorize or file it into some framework of meaning. It just…is. Cold. Unyielding. Brutal. No rhyme. No reason. More unfair than a coin toss, more random than a roll of the
dice. Just a process, beyond our control. The universe dares me to find meaning in it—and laughs when I try.

The grief lingers. Sometimes heavy and crushing, sometimes just a dull haze—but never truly gone. It’s like walking through a world with the color turned down. And because I don’t know how long we have, or what each visit will take from him, I can’t brace myself. Each time I see him, the grief starts all over again.

My father isn’t just fading. He’s being dismantled—mind, heart, body, and soul—shredded piece by piece, and I have to watch. And he knows. He’s more aware than anyone of what’s happening to him. This is a path we walk together, for a time. But in the end, it is his journey.

As we near the clearing at the end of his path, he tells me stories—about his childhood, about his parents, about his marriage to my mom. He speaks of triumphs and regrets, burdens, and brokenness. He even told me about being drafted during the Vietnam War, and how when the doctor asked if he’d go willingly, he said, “Sure, but I’ll get wounded and draw disability for the rest of my life.” They marked him 4F.

He’s told me other things, too—things I can’t share, things that changed how I see him. His need for control. His short temper. I see them now as armor, coping mechanisms forged in a fire I never knew he’d walked through. For twenty-five years we fought. And all this time, what we really needed to do was talk. To listen. To meet each other as equals, not as roles. And now, as we finally begin to understand one another, it’s just in time to start losing him.

The anger I held onto for so long has unraveled. Not disappeared, but softened. Replaced by understanding. By something warmer. Compassion, maybe. It didn’t erase the hurt, but it reframed it. We were both doing the best we could with what we had.

These conversations almost always happen on the back porch, while we pass a joint between us—something I never imagined we’d do together. He’d always disapproved of my smoking. But when legalization hit our state, he started using a little before bed. And somewhere along the line, it became something we shared.

We sit in the dark. He starts talking. His voice trembles with emotion. I just listen, letting the words settle. Sometimes I want to cry, but I don’t. Sometimes I do. And when I speak, I tell him the things I’ve hidden too—about what happened to me, about the pain I carried. I feel it all again when I say it aloud, but I say it anyway.

It feels like he’s trying to get it all out before the memories leave him. Because one day, they will.

That’s the reality. Cold. Uncompromising. It doesn’t break into pieces that are easier to carry. I can’t move forward into the future, can’t take comfort in the past, and can’t stay rooted in the present. All of it bleeds together.

I remember going home for Thanksgiving. My dad had recently purchased a guitar—the same make, model, and year as the one he had throughout my childhood. As he played it, the familiar sound of his guitar filled the room—sharp, warm, the strings vibrating with the same richness they always had. For a moment, I wasn’t here in the present. I was a child again, listening to him play by the fireplace. His voice, the guitar—identical—but his face was lined, his head twitched, his hands shook. It was like seeing the ghost of the past come alive, solid and real. I had to hold back the tears that threatened to flow. As I watched and listened, I felt my grief sharpen like a blade; his illness, his decline, more visible in that moment than ever before.

The sound of the guitar—the sound of a hundred winter nights by the fireplace—should have been a timeless comfort, but it felt like an anachronism, a relic of a past that’s slipping away. His hands, once steady, now trembled, betraying the body that had once been so strong. The music remained the same, but everything else had changed. The permanence of that change was undeniable, and with that realization—the brutal truth of time passing and the inevitability of his decline—a heavier, more crushing truth fell on me. In my mind, swirling over and over in an unending loop, I couldn’t escape the nagging thought that maybe all of this—the illness, the loss, the pain, the grief—was ultimately just a tiny part of some greater absurdity, a process beyond our understanding or control. The universe, indifferent to our suffering, seems to mock the very idea of meaning.

I simply must endure. I must sit with it. It feels unbearable. Unsustainable. A weight no one should have to hold.

And yet—I must.

Because there is no other choice.

I cannot change it.

So I must witness it.

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