“I can’t hold on to my memories.” His voice cracked softly. “Everything slips through me. I try to grab onto things and they’re just…” He shook his head weakly. “Gone.”
His hand trembled violently in Callum’s grasp.
“I know they matter. I know they do.” Tears welled in his cloudy eyes. “But I can’t find them anymore.”
Callum felt his throat close. Because this wasn’t confusion anymore. This was awareness.
“I feel like I’m disappearing,” his taid whispered. “Bit by bit.” His breathing hitched painfully. “And one day I won’t remember your mam. Or your nain.” His eyes searched Callum’s face desperately, as though trying to memorize him before it was too late. “Or you.”
The last two words nearly destroyed him.
Past and present bled together in his taid’s expression—fear, grief, confusion, shame. Like he was mourning himself while he was still alive enough to know what he was losing.
“I don’t want to forget,” he whispered, voice breaking completely now. “God, Callum, I don’t want to forget you.”
Callum couldn’t breathe for a second.
Because suddenly he was eight years old again, sitting on this man’s shoulders. Twelve years old learning how to fish beside him. Sixteen years old being told that heartbreak wouldn’t kill him, even if it felt like it might.
This man had been solid his entire life. Immovable. The person who remembered everything.
And now he couldn’t even trust his own mind to hold onto the people he loved.
“Everything will be fine,” Callum whispered hoarsely, pulling him into his arms.
But the words felt useless. Fragile. Meaningless against something this cruel.
His taid broke apart against him with a sound Callum knew he would carry for the rest of his life. Deep, helpless sobs shook through his body, the kind that came from somewhere beyond dignity.
Callum held him tighter. The man who had once carried him through every storm now felt frighteningly small in his arms.
Callum stared over his shoulder, jaw clenched so tightly it hurt, forcing himself not to cry. His taid didn’t need to comfort him too. Not now. Not in this tiny, devastating moment of clarity the disease had accidentally allowed him.
“Everything will be fine,” he repeated softly, over and over again, like if he said it enough times maybe it would become true.
His taid eventually pulled back just enough to wipe at his face with trembling hands.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
And somehow, that apology shattered Callum more than anything else. Because it sounded genuine. As though he believed hehad failed them somehow. As though forgetting the people he loved was a personal weakness instead of a disease slowly eating away at him from the inside.
“It’s not your fault,” Callum said immediately, voice breaking despite himself.
But Alzheimer’s did that to people. It stole memories first, and then dignity right after. It hollowed people out slowly enough that everyone they loved had to watch it happen in pieces. A name forgotten here. A face misplaced there. Entire lifetimes dissolving quietly inside a brain that could no longer carry them. And the cruelest part was that sometimes they knew. Sometimes there were moments like this, terrible moments of clarity, where they understood exactly what was happening to them. Where they realized they were losing everyone they loved while those people were still standing right in front of them.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Callum tried to smile, to sound reassuring.
Then, his taid smiled. “So, where’s my love? Where’s Teresa?”
Callum smiled back, swallowing the ache. “She’s down at the beach, taid. She’s down at the beach.”
He walked his taid slowly back inside, one careful step at a time. The old man leaned heavier against him than usual, exhausted by the weight of his own emotions. Every few seconds, he seemed to drift somewhere else entirely, gaze unfocused before blinking himself back into the present again. Callum kept his hand firm around his arm the entire way up the stairs, terrified that if he let go, even for a second, something else would slip away too.
By the time they reached the bedroom, his taid looked drained.
Callum helped him sit on the edge of the bed before crouching in front of him to pull off his slippers the same way his grandfather used to do for him when he fell asleep in the car as a child. The memory hit him so suddenly it nearly knocked the air from his lungs.
His taid looked down at him with tired, red-rimmed eyes.
