I remember my grandpa taking me to the park as a child, pushing me on the swings. He would push me first, then my older sister would scream “Taia!” and he would go running over, a pretend tired look on his face. As he pushed her, my younger sister would call for him, and he would go running over again. I remember him whenever we’d visit his apartment in Florida, and the clear view we had of the ocean from his balcony. The sun set right through the view between the buildings, the only glimpse of the ocean we got. Visiting him was a childhood pastime I’d always loved.

I heard my mom and grandma talking about him one day. They were worried he was becoming more forgetful. My grandpa refused to go to the doctor. He was a proud old Romanian man who did not need a doctor, as there was nothing wrong with him. Eventually, after forgetting where he was, my mom took him to the doctor. I’d heard of alzheimer's before, but I thought it was one of those things that didn’t happen to someone you knew.

I didn’t recognize any difference in my grandpa. He’d still wake up early to make my sisters and I breakfast, then he’d drive us to school, making jokes the whole time. “I love you”, and “make sure you always pray before bed”, he’d say, just like he always did. I told myself he wasn’t sick. There was nothing wrong with him. He remembered our names, what we each liked to eat for breakfast, how to drive to school.
I’d been away at college for a semester, and looking forward to winter break. I wanted to go somewhere warm with my friends, but no one could go anywhere. Disappointed, I gave up my search for a tropical getaway in the middle of the winter until my mom mentioned my grandpa’s Florida apartment. Memories of my childhood spent in the sun flooded back, and I was excited by the prospect. A week in paradise, just like the old days, with just my grandpa.

He was overjoyed to see me at the airport. He did his joking tired run towards me, and grabbed my luggage, as he always did, because he didn’t want me to overexert myself. We stepped outside into the warm, humid Florida air. “Over here”, he told me, walking towards a row of parked cars. He stood in front of one and pressed the button on his keys, but it didn’t unlock. He pressed the button again, then realized it was the wrong car. “I just got a new one”, he explained, as he began to walk down the row of cars. “It’s just over here”.

Car after car, row after row, no car unlocked. We had been walking around for half an hour, sweating, looking for his car. I had been patient, checking my phone, waiting for him to have that “aha” moment we all have when we realize where we parked our car, but that didn’t happen. I looked over and saw his frustrated face as he sweated, dragging along my heavy luggage, pressing the button over and over in the middle of the big parking lot. It hit me in that moment that his disease was real, and that he was slowly forgetting details.
I started fighting off tears and asked him in my strongest voice what color his car was, the make, anything that could help me identify it so we could go to his apartment, and I could forget about this. The look on my grandpa’s face, more than the fact that he couldn’t find his car, scared me. He didn’t know what was going on. He could not remember where he was in fifteen minutes ago.

That night, I lay in bed thinking about how my grandpa’s condition had deteriorated. This was the same man I had known my whole life, all 18 years, and suddenly everything was different. He had always run over to help me carry something, because him at 78 years old felt that he had to protect me from getting hurt overexerting myself.

At lunch, my grandpa offered to walk over to the pizza shop and buy me a slice for lunch. The pizza shop right next door made the biggest slices of pizza I’d ever seen, and I remembered struggling as a child to eat the whole thing. Now done with my first semester of college, I was trying to avoid putting on more weight by eating such a big slice, but it was a tradition at my grandpa’s apartment.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back from his walk to the pizza shop next door. He handed me my slice in the pizza box and sat down across from me with his slice. I watched him gingerly take a knife and fork and start cutting his pizza to eat. “Eat your food”, he told me, excited to have lunch with me. I opened the box and found a plain cheese pizza, not the mushroom pizza I had asked for. My grandpa noticed the quizzical look on my face. “Is it not exactly what you wanted? I can go back”, he exclaimed, already standing up to go fix it. “No no no! This is the pizza I wanted! Let’s have lunch”, I smiled.

That night, I went out on the balcony and looked towards the ocean. There were three new buildings, and there was no longer an ocean view. The sunset illuminated the sides of the buildings, and the sun wasn’t visible anymore because of them. It felt like a completely different apartment.