“Because she’s the one in my house who notices things,” he said. “And I’ve started to recognize what that looks like from the other side.”

Chapter 14 — Tuesdays

Here is what nobody tells you about a locked memory care unit.

It smells fine. There are cats. There is a woman named Bernadine who has been trying to leave for a wedding since 2021 and who is redirected eleven times a day, gently, by people who are paid nineteen dollars an hour.

And your father, who ran a room by walking into it, will spend his last years being praised for eating.

The guardianship hearing was in August of that first year, on the fourth floor of the Denver Probate Court, and it took twenty-two minutes.

I testified that my father lacked capacity to manage his person and his finances. I said it under oath, into a microphone, with him sitting eleven feet away in a good jacket that I had bought him, not understanding what the proceeding was and being unfailingly polite to the bailiff.