I’m old now. Might as well get this off my chest now while I’m still breathing. I was never a religious man, but at 85 years old, you start to think about things like that. The afterlife. Who you were as a person. What awaits you when everything goes black. I think I’m writing this for the both of us. Mimi’s too far gone now to even understand the world she’s living in, let alone the one that could embrace her after she draws that last breath. Doctors diagnosed her two weeks after her 81st birthday. We didn’t need that diagnosis. Well, I didn’t, at least. I noticed the signs before we even stepped foot in a hospital. It started with names at first. Calling our son by her father’s name, calling me by her brother’s, and vice versa. That kinda thing, you know? When she started wandering around at night, though, that’s when I knew it was time to confront the inevitable. It was strange, though. Her wandering didn’t really feel like wandering. She was deliberately going to one specific loca...
A few years ago I was waiting at the airport for my delayed flight when this older woman suddenly ran up and hugged me. Before I could even react she yelled: “OH MY GOD LOOK HOW TALL YOU GOT.” I was 22. Then like six more people appeared out of nowhere smiling at me like I had just returned from war. At this point I realized two things: 1. They definitely thought I was someone else. 2. It had already gone too far to correct them naturally. So I just awkwardly committed to it. They kept asking me questions about college, my “new apartment,” and whether I was “still dating that girl from Boston.” I have never been to Boston in my life. At one point a little kid asked me: “Can you still do the bird noise?” Apparently Fake Me could do bird impressions. So now I’m standing in the middle of an airport making aggressive pigeon sounds while an entire family cheers me on. Eventually the real guy showed up. Same height. Same haircut. Same jacket. The silence when everyone realized I was a rand...