My father was, for the first thirty years of my life, the largest person in any room. Not physically - in presence. He filled space. He had opinions at volume, took up the conversation, was the person other people oriented themselves toward. I measured myself against him for decades.

In the last three years he has become quieter. He loses words in sentences, pauses in the middle of things, sometimes looks at me with an expression I don't recognize - mild and slightly uncertain - that is not the expression of the man I grew up with. The diagnosis is early-stage. We are told it is slow. We have been told a lot of things that turn out to mean: this is the direction, and the direction does not change.

What I was not prepared for is grief before the loss. Anticipatory grief is real but I had never experienced it until now - the strange dissonance of sitting with someone who is present while simultaneously mourning them. He is here. He is also already partially // gone, by increments, in ways that only I can measure because I hold the comparison. My siblings don't remember the same father I remember. They were older or younger and had a different version. The one I'm losing is specific to me.

I find myself recording things. I wrote down a story he told recently, verbatim. I keep notes of the sharp observations, the moments when he is fully himself, because I understand now that there will be a point past which there are no new moments, and I am trying to build an archive.

Have you watched someone change slowly? Is there a difference between losing someone all at once and losing them piece by piece?