Dear Father,

In her letter to Dr. and Mrs. J. G. Holland, Emily Dickinson wrote, I write to you. I receive no letter. Dear Father, why does Mother keep dusting the stars? I write to her too. But I receive no letter. You don’t read my letters either. Sometimes I think it would be easier if grief were no longer blurred. If I could just ride it like a horse.

Father, other times I’m so happy to have the frame that holds your organs even if when you look at me, all you see is flickering. When I look at you, I imagine myself inside your head, looking out at me, something that is not you, but of you. Someone you recently called your wife or your mother. And now call nothing.

I know you haven’t read H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, because you can’t read, but she writes about the death of her father so well: The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.^xxv

When someone has dementia, or any brain disease, grief is multidimensional. You grieve them while you are wiping their nose or cutting their food into small limbs. Part of them is dead, part of them is dying. But so much of them is still alive. It’s like Macdonald’s earth, but that person is only partially buried. Every time you turn the spade, you poke them and they try and get up, wander around until you have to rebury them, tuck them back into the earth. I have had so many funerals for you, Father. I hide my hands in my pockets because they are always covered with dirt.

Yesterday, you wandered into another resident’s room and got into a fight. You lost the fight. Do you remember how tall you are? 5’5” and 140 pounds. Do you know how tall the men in your facility are? Much taller than you.

By the time I was able to get to the ER, your face was all swollen on one side, lip bloody and ballooned, shirt ripped. No one witnessed the fight, but I heard that you had wandered into the wrong room. I’ve never seen you fight anyone, never a bruise on your body.

I’ve only seen you get angry in public once—my junior year in college when you were trying to negotiate a lower price for a rug for my apartment. The salesperson told you to go back to China, and you yelled back. I wonder how many times you’ve wanted to show anger like that but couldn’t, wouldn’t. I wonder how many times you have been told to go back to a country that wasn’t even yours.

I remember Mother hunched over your hospital bed, after your stroke, the last time you had your own brain. The last time we had our own brains. Before Mother died, she said, Who will take care of him? There was a father. Then there wasn’t a father.

Mother knew everything. Mother hoarded everything, even history. Those who know everything always seem to die first. There was a mother. Then there wasn’t a mother. There was a history. Then there wasn’t a history.

Dear Father, if I were really Chinese, I would have you live at home with me. Mother knew that I wasn’t a real Chinese person.

Secretly I was happy to hear that the other man also had a bruise on his face. This means you at least got one punch in. This means you fought back. This means I am not a good person. They won’t tell me who the man is, but today I will find the man with the bruise on his face. I will smile at the bruise. The bruise will not smile back.

I learned later that shortly after your fight, the man died. You were his final fight. Maybe he confused you with death.

I’m sorry for doing a terrible job caring for you. I think Mother knew I wouldn’t do a good job. I want to tell her that I want so badly to be a part of this world, to stand in it, but every hand I touch withholds warmth. The world gathers everywhere beyond me. Is this how Mother felt too? Invisible to everyone but you, but also invisible to you.

Mother would be glad to know that yesterday Diane was able to go to the ER with you. Diane was diagnosed with cancer when she was eighteen and was given three weeks to live. Diane is fifty-five. She was told she would never have children. She has a thirty-three-year-old son. I now know more about Diane’s history than Mother’s history, than your history. Diane held my hand in the ER like a mother would. Like Mother never did.

You can tell when someone has suffered deeply. Their heart is smaller and it no longer smokes. I want my heart to be smaller, too, more used up. When I look down at my heart, it is no longer there. I find it kneeling in the corner and shaking. I tell it in Chinese to stand up, but it doesn’t understand me. When I command it in English, it only gets larger.

Like Mother, I always have snacks in my purse. At the ER, I handed you a Kit Kat. Your mouth made noises that only a mouth God made could make. You knew what you were eating. You knew you had eaten it before. You knew you liked it. I dug through my purse as if I were looking for Mother’s body. I gave you another and another until my purse was empty.