The House Still Standing

They keep calling it forgetting
like the word is small enough
to fit in a coat pocket.
It ain’t.
It’s a slow robbery
done in daylight
while everybody watches
and nobody can grab the thief.

For the one inside it
you wake in a room you paid for
and the furniture has new names.
Your face in the glass
looks like somebody you used to know
and can’t introduce.
Words leave first.
Then the map.
Then the reason you walked into the kitchen.
You are still in there.
That’s the cruelest part.

For the ones who love you
we learn a grief
that don’t wait for a funeral.
We answer the same question
until our mouths go dry.
We smile when you call us
by a name that belongs to the dead.
Then we stop correcting you
because being right
starts to look like cruelty.

For the ones who stay in the house
the days get long and quiet
in the loudest way.
You bathe a body that used to hold you.
You hide the keys.
You hide the knives.
You hide your face in the laundry
so you don’t have to be seen
coming apart on a Tuesday.
Love turns into shift work.
Shift work turns into a prayer
you don’t believe in
but keep saying
because stopping feels like leaving.

Some nights you laugh
at a joke that wandered in
from twenty years ago.
Some mornings a hand finds a hand
like it never forgot the way.

Dementia don’t just take memory.
It takes the witness.
It leaves a person
and a room full of people
who remember them
better than they can remember themselves.

Nobody wins this.
You just keep showing up
to a story unwriting itself
and you call that love
because every other word
is too clean.

We stay.
We say the name
even when the name
doesn’t come back.