One day, you realize in mid-conversation with your parents that you are old. That you have become the parent and them, the child, that life is now shifting gears and going in reverse. Your child will be in the living room, taking his first steps at fifteen months, and you’ll excitedly yell over the phone, “He’s walking, he’s walking!” and you’ll hear your father speaking over you concerning something unrelated. You’ll realize he wasn’t listening to you. You realize you are now at that point where you can’t tell the difference between whether he is hard of hearing or whether he doesn’t want to hear you, whether life is speeding too quickly for him and he must get in everything at once, and therefore cannot slow down to listen to you. There is no time left for him. Maybe this is what’s happening.

Maybe, sometimes, you wonder whether the metaphorical black hole enlarging in his brain is more real than you think, whether your father is really forgetting things or whether he chooses to forget. And is there a difference? When you call him three or four days after you last talked and he says you don’t call him at all, or when you know, even when he’s an ocean away in Haiti and you are in Miami, that the cook has made him breakfast and he declined to eat, that later he will blame the cook for not cooking at all. You know it isn’t the cook’s fault. You wonder: did he really forget? Or is he creating alternate universes for himself? 

Your father has always been a rational man by profession. As an attorney, he uses reason and writes out defenses and memorizes them, and makes you study to acquire the same mental skills, if not better. Your father has always been meticulous, from head to toe. Your father has always been the man who prided himself in appearances, and feared germs so much that he washed his hands with sanitizer by habit after shaking people’s hands. 

But you know the father under the layer of man people see outside his home. You know the man behind closed doors, who has always been fairly irrational. The man who never let you out with friends for fear that you will be kidnapped, a fear not unfounded in a country like Haiti where kidnappings are rampant, but a fear that never goes away from him even when things get better. This is the man who panics when you send him photographs of your child because there is a bit of redness on the skin just below the nose. He can explain to you the rationale. “He is allergic. Have him checked. It has to be the dogs. Don’t let him near the dogs. It’s the dog hair.” And you rationalize with him that the child is fine, that the tubes from the NICU at the hospital have left a redness that will go away, but he insists that it’s the dog, even a year later when the child is fine. 

The photograph you send from mother’s day at the botanical garden center is even worse. In that photograph, the child is admiring an alligator in the water from behind a fence. That one is terrifying enough to warrant an email from your father. He says, “I see an alligator in that picture, and the child is too close to it, he could be eaten. Frankly, I am afraid for his safety.” If you weren’t separated by distance, he would call child services and have them seize your offspring.

The simplified truth is that your father is losing his reason right under your eyes and everyone else’s eyes, and no one can do much about it except watch it escape him like a murmuration of dunlins, a murder of crows in flight towards other spaces. Sometimes, you wonder if that’s not what it is. Reason. A formation of birds fleeing the body, an undefined nimbus containing reality taking off to undefined destinations. Maybe that nimbus stops to spill the reality somewhere. Your father sleeps with a woman named loneliness, who wakes up in his bed and shrouds him in the morning like a coat, and he wears it on his drive to work and back, and she eats with him at the table where his family should be sleeping, and she drinks his wine. She doesn’t care that you are not there. She knows, as you know, that he has made his bed that way. He has driven everyone away, and has fallen in love with his own madness, so much that now there is no room for wife or children to return, let alone grandchildren. 

Your mother divorced him, his girlfriend bailed out emotionally. Your brother lives in Miami and has no desire to see him or talk to him because he is fed up with his caprices, his unreasonable fits of anger about everything, his hatred of everything and everyone. Your father admits to you, over the phone, that he has “dark thoughts.” Des idées noires. And you know what this means. But you choose to believe he would never exit the world this way. You know he loves you too much. Or you choose to believe he cannot.

It gets progressively worse, now. And you bite your lip because you are expected to have patience, the way parents have patience with children feeling in the dark for the shape of real things. You begin to realize there are monsters under his bed, and each phone call is a cry for help, a plea for you to get them out. And you don’t know how. The only tool you are armed with is duty, a virtue that is equal parts patience and labor, and you sometimes raise your voice to scream on the phone so he hears you, “Your grandson is walking, he is teething, he is growing.” What you mean to say is, “You’re missing all of this, where the hell are you?” and that does not come out that way. 

But when the phone is hung, and you climb into bed, your ear pressed against the mute murmurs of your pillow, you replay the conversation in your mind and hear him again, and you wonder, did he really not hear you? And right before you lose your breath, your heart quickens with a new awareness that he did hear you and that is precisely the reason why what he wants to talk about is his imminent death, his loneliness, and fears. Because his grandson’s milestones are milestones for himself, in reverse. Because he is headed backwards to the mysterious navel that spat him out once into his loneliness. And all he wants is to hold on before disappearing into his own black hole, into his own darkness. And that awareness stays with you and sinks into slumber with you, and you wake up with heaviness on your chest. You are old. You are now the parent. And the work is difficult.