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Show Because I am the oldest in my family, I cannot say what it is like to have an older sibling, one whom, perhaps, you have revered your entire life, whose path you have followed, whose choices you have been taught to see as good and right, and whose decline you must witness. Instead, I am familiar with the responsibility of being the eldest, of making a path, of always being watched. I know, I just forgot, says Jerry, the one who never failed his siblings or his children. My first thoughts are how hard that moment must be for two men born just after the Depression when fragility and error simply were not options. I imagine the shifting of feet, the stoking of fire, the busying of hands with mess kits and fishing line, anything to ignore the monster that has crept into camp threatening to disrupt a pattern, a practiced way of being, that these two men have lived for over sixty years. But later, I reconsider this moment in my dad's story. My dad reads the early signs of mental deterioration in Jerry's inability to distinguish between reality and figment, but I wonder if the dementia is not working to refigure a truer truth, one not bound by actual truth but one that seeps into what memoirists call the emotional truth of things. What if Jerry's failing mind is only failing to erect the boundaries and borders we typically build and that, in those moments, the possibility exists that those who are not "there" are actually there. What if it feels as if others are warming themselves by the fire and the felt truth is the actual truth. What if, rather than being alone in the Alaskan wilds without fuel and with physical and mental loss pressing in, my dad and his brother are actually surrounded with family, a fact that only Jerry understands but one that he registers in the story that he tells. 241 |