Where is your father? He’s dead, Mommy. She sobs over the piece of frosted layer cake the memory care center has given her as a welcome celebration. She forks bites of chocolate and thick white buttercream into her…
My goal with “Father Figure” was threefold.
First, I wanted to write about a character who was important to my mother’s dementia: my father. I am still struggling to write about him directly (he was a fraught figure in my life). Focusing on how he haunted our conversations, after he died, was the best way I found to depict her increasing conviction that he was still alive.
Second, I love list stories but when I’ve tried to write them in the past, it’s felt more like a gimmick than a necessity. In this instance, the list allowed me to show how “therapeutic fibs” (the lies you have to tell people with dementia) take on their own logic. Each time my mother asked an iteration of the same question—Where is your dad?—I had to invent new answers. The listing of these answers felt right to me; the form demonstrated the escalation and stakes of the lies I had to tell.
Third, the call-and-response structure to “Father Figure” allowed me to depict the circularity of dementia. How many ways can I answer the same question and more so, how do I go back in time so I can be gentle to my mother? I could have used negative numbers, to indicate times our conversations regressed. When, for example, she forgot who I was or that she even had kids, so it felt like we were moving backwards, behind a baseline of zero. Or I could had repeated some to indicate a kind of stasis, but with the forward progression, I wanted to show how my mother’s body had a predictable decline that moved in one direction (toward death), even as her mind was all over the place.
In “Father Figure,” numbering imposes a sense of order on an experience that was both chaotic and inevitable. The list let me explore the tension between linearity and randomness. This story is part of a larger collection about my mother’s decline where I use weaving, fragmentation, and braiding; here, the list allowed me to depict, in a more contained way, the messy experience of dementia.
REBECCA TIGER is a sociologist and writer who divides her time between New York City and Athens. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and published in Bending Genres, Cowboy Jamboree, CRAFT, Pithead Chapel, trampset, and elsewhere. She is the flash fiction editor for Blood+Honey Lit. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @rtigernyc.
