I often imagine what it would be like if my father were still

Host: The morning light crept slowly across the worn wooden floorboards of the old beach house, spilling gold through the lace of tattered curtains. Dust floated in the beams, shimmering like forgotten memories caught midair. Outside, the sea murmured softly against the rocks, its rhythm eternal, indifferent.

Jeeny stood near the window, holding a framed photograph — a black-and-white portrait of an old man in military uniform, eyes fierce but kind. Jack sat at the table behind her, a cup of coffee cooling between his hands. The radio played faintly in the background — a soft cello piece, elegiac, almost sacred.

Host: It was his birthday, or it would have been — the father she barely remembered, and yet could never forget. The world outside seemed to honor him with silence.

Jeeny: “You ever think about what it means to lose someone twice, Jack? Once to time, and then again to memory?”

Jack: “Alzheimer’s,” he said flatly, his eyes tracing the wood grain of the table. “Cruelest thief there is. Doesn’t just steal a person — it erases the witness to your own life.”

Host: She nodded, the photo trembling slightly in her hand.

Jeeny: “Patti Davis wrote about her father like that — about imagining what it would be like if he were still here, to see the world, to mark his hundredth birthday. But she knew he was gone long before his heart stopped beating. That’s what Alzheimer’s does. It eats years, possibilities, hopes.”

Jack: “Yeah,” he muttered, “it eats the past until you start to doubt you ever had one.”

Host: The sea wind slipped through the window, carrying with it the salt of old sorrows.

Jeeny: “When my father forgot my name,” she whispered, “I felt like the earth opened. Like time folded in on itself. He was there — breathing, blinking — but every time I looked into his eyes, it was like I was knocking on the door of an empty house.”

Jack: “And still you stayed.”

Jeeny: “How could I not? Love doesn’t depend on being remembered.”

Host: Jack looked up, the grey of his eyes softening, his voice heavy with something between reason and ache.

Jack: “But it depends on being real, doesn’t it? If someone doesn’t remember you, are you still part of their life — or just a ghost haunting the edges of their brain?”

Jeeny: “You sound like you’ve never lost someone to forgetfulness.”

Jack: “I lost my mother that way. She used to hum the same song every morning when she made breakfast — some Sinatra tune. Then one day, she asked me who he was. Then she asked me who I was. You can’t fight something like that, Jeeny. You just… watch them vanish in slow motion.”

Host: The waves crashed, distant and mournful. The sound filled the silence that followed — a sound older than grief itself.

Jeeny: “So you understand.”

Jack: “I understand the cruelty. Not the beauty you try to find in it.”

Jeeny: “There is beauty, Jack. Even in the forgetting. Even in the way a person looks at you for the last time — their eyes lost but still searching for warmth.”

Jack: “Beauty? You call that beauty?”

Jeeny: “Yes. Because it reminds you that love isn’t a transaction of recognition. It’s a promise that survives even when one person can’t keep their end of it.”

Host: The light shifted, falling on Jeeny’s face. Her eyes glistened — not just with sadness, but with defiance. The kind of quiet faith that refuses to die, even under the weight of reality.

Jack: “You talk like you can romanticize anything. Even disease.”

Jeeny: “I’m not romanticizing. I’m remembering that once, there was laughter, and music, and the smell of paint on his hands. Alzheimer’s didn’t erase that. It just buried it under fog. My job is to keep digging.”

Jack: “Digging hurts.”

Jeeny: “So does forgetting.”

Host: A long pause. The clock ticked. The wind sighed through the old beams of the house, carrying echoes of laughter that no longer lived there.

Jack: “Patti Davis imagined her father at a hundred — Reagan, right? The great communicator, undone by silence. Must’ve felt ironic.”

Jeeny: “It’s not irony. It’s fate. Maybe the universe was teaching her something about voice — about how even the most powerful lose their words. Maybe she learned that love doesn’t need speeches to exist.”

Jack: “Or maybe she learned that even legends die ordinary deaths. Like the rest of us.”

Host: He rose, moving toward the window. The light fell across his face, revealing exhaustion — not physical, but existential. The kind that comes from years of holding logic like a shield.

Jack: “When I visited my mother the last time, she smiled at me. And for a second, I thought she knew. But she didn’t. She was smiling at the feeling of me — not the fact of me.”

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s enough.”

Jack: “Enough? You call a smile without meaning enough?”

Jeeny: “If it carries warmth, yes. Because warmth doesn’t ask for names. It just exists. Like sunlight. Or music.”

Host: The sea breeze swelled, carrying the faint cry of gulls. The light in the room shifted to a deeper gold, as though the day itself were listening.

Jack: “You always find poetry in pain.”

Jeeny: “Pain is where poetry hides. It’s where truth stops pretending to be strong.”

Host: Jack turned toward her now, his eyes shadowed with something human, almost childlike.

Jack: “You know what’s strange? I don’t remember my mother’s face anymore. I remember her perfume, her laugh, her handwriting — but not her face. Isn’t that how forgetting works? It picks what it wants to keep.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. That’s how love works. It keeps what matters.”

Host: Silence again. Only the low hum of the sea. The photograph in Jeeny’s hand caught the light, the man’s eyes almost seeming to move — a trick of sun and time.

Jeeny: “I think about what he’d say if he were here. If he could see the world now — all the noise, the chaos, the beauty still trying to live in it. Would he be proud of who I became? Would he even recognize me?”

Jack: “He would. Not with his memory, but with his essence. Love’s like that. It doesn’t need continuity. It’s written deeper than time.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe forgetting isn’t the end of love. Maybe it’s the test of it.”

Host: The rain began outside, slow and rhythmic, like the ticking of eternity.

Jack: “You ever think memory’s just a trick the brain plays to make us believe in permanence?”

Jeeny: “And love’s the trick the soul plays to remind us there’s something more.”

Host: The tension eased. The world softened. The rain turned into a lullaby against the roof.

Jeeny set the photo down gently. Jack moved closer, resting his hand lightly on hers — hesitant, respectful, fragile.

Jack: “Maybe Davis was right to imagine. Maybe imagination’s the only way to keep the dead alive.”

Jeeny: “Not the dead. The living parts of them that never stopped breathing in us.”

Host: Outside, the storm passed. The sky cleared into a bruised lavender, the horizon stretching wide and forgiving. The waves continued, their rhythm unchanged — eternal, unjudging.

Jack and Jeeny stood side by side at the window, watching the light fade into sea and memory alike.

Host: And in that fragile silence, they both understood what it meant to love someone who no longer remembers you — that love, real love, does not end in memory, nor in death. It endures in the quiet act of remembering for them.

And as the final light of evening touched the photograph, the old man’s eyes seemed to glimmer once more — not with recognition, but with something far greater: peace.