You know that feeling when a moment hits you so hard, it feels like all the air gets knocked out of your lungs, but you can’t make a sound? That’s where I’ve been sitting for the past few weeks, ever since the rhododendrons started blooming. My old man, he’s… fading. And it’s a slow, fucking brutal retreat. I was over at his place, like I am most afternoons now. Just puttering about, trying to make myself useful, trying to keep things resembling some semblance of order for him. The garden, well, that used to be his pride. Every spring, he’d be out there from sunup to sundown, directing me where to prune, explaining the soil pH like he was a goddamn botanist. He had a memory for every plant, every year it was planted, every slight modification he’d made to the beds. He could trace the lineage of a single rosebush back three decades. A real… encyclopedic mind, for that sort of thing. Anyway, I was pulling some weeds near the azaleas, and he wandered out onto the patio. The sun was warm, not too hot, and he had that wistful look he gets sometimes, like he’s trying to recall a dream that keeps slipping away. He stood there for a good five minutes, just staring at the sprawling rose garden that literally borders his patio. A sea of pinks and reds and yellows that he himself designed, planted, and nurtured for over forty years. It’s glorious right now, absolutely bursting. Then he turned to me, his eyes a little unfocused, and he said, “That’s… that’s a beautiful garden, isn’t it?” And I smiled, you know, the tight, polite smile you offer when someone states the obvious, and I said, “It is, Dad. Always has been.” And he just nodded, slowly, still looking at it. Then he asked, very quietly, “Do you know whose it is?” And that’s when it hit me. The air just… stopped. I froze, trowel in hand, a goddamn dandelion root still clenched in my fingers. He wasn’t testing me. He wasn’t making a joke. He was genuinely asking. He didn’t recognize his own goddamn garden. The place he poured his life into after Nam, after the shit he saw, after he came back and couldn't stand the confines of a regular job. This garden was his therapy, his refuge, his goddamn sanity. And he looked at it like a stranger. I just managed to say, “It’s yours, Dad. This is your garden.” And he just squinted a little, still searching, like he was trying to place it. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Yes. Of course.” But his tone… it wasn’t conviction. It was a polite acceptance, like you’d get from someone who doesn’t want to contradict you, but isn’t quite convinced either. Like I’d just told him a pleasant little anecdote about some far-off place. That’s when you realize you’re watching a demolition in slow motion. You see the beams buckle, the walls crumble, and you can’t do a damn thing but stand there and observe the structural integrity give way. He used to be so… precise. So in control. (A necessary adaptation, I always thought, for someone who saw what he saw, who had to command men and make impossible decisions.) Now it’s all… loose. Drifting. I know, rationally, that the day is coming when he looks at me and asks who the hell I am. You brace yourself for it, mentally. You read the articles, you talk to the doctors, you try to prepare for the statistical inevitability. But it’s different when it’s your father, the man who taught you how to tie your goddamn shoes, who held your hand when you were scared of thunder, who fixed your goddamn bike a hundred times. Sometimes I just sit in his living room, watching him watch some old war documentary he’s seen a million times, and I trace the lines on his face, the ones that tell the story of a life. And I wonder how much of that story is left inside him, how much he can still access. Or if it’s all just… dissolving. Like smoke in the wind. And the hardest part? It’s watching him go, piece by fucking piece, knowing I’m next in line for that particular brand of oblivion. It's a real shitshow.