A Hidden Letter in Closet

 

A Hidden Letter in the Closet: Love, Memory, and the Slow Fade of Dementia

My Love,

By the time your eyes fall on these words, I may already be elsewhere—some dim hallway where memory no longer knows my name.

The truth is, I have been fading for longer than either of us cared to admit. First, in the small cracks between our conversations. Then, in the quiet dinners where silence sat heavier than the food on our plates. And now, in the slow, steady unraveling of my mind.

It is not so hard, you see—this slipping away. Because so much between us has already dissolved. The companionship, the warmth, the easy laughter that once tethered us to each other… they are shadows now. What is left to forget, when forgetting has already lived here for years?

I no longer fear the dark. It feels almost merciful. To lose names, to lose places, even to lose you—it is simply the last act of a forgetting that has long been rehearsed inside our walls.

If I am gone in mind before I am gone in body, do not search for me. I will not be hiding—I will have become absence itself. And perhaps, in that absence, there will finally be peace between us.

Still, I leave you this faint proof: I was here. I existed beside you. I loved, though awkwardly. I decayed, as we all do. And in my vanishing, I release both of us.

No promises. No farewells. Only silence, carried forward.

—Yours once,
[Initial or simply “Me”]

hidden letter,” 

“closet,” “

before I forget you

Alzheimer

Dementia

Memory loss

Marriage

Companionship

silence