The Vest

A collection of thoughts about bracing for loss and how our relationships change as our bodies unfold by Allison Chow with a response in their native tongue by her father David Chow. 

Pt 1 

Does it ever feel like your loved ones are melting away like ice cream? 

A year ago, my dad started experiencing spells of memory loss. Confusion clouds his eyes and an afternoon would blink from existence. More and more, I’d find him staring up from under a desk, or lying on the living room floor like a Roomba that almost made it back to the charger. 

With a pencil and pad of paper, I tried to bank all the memories he couldn’t. I’d listen to him have a conversation on the phone, make plans, and dictate them back to him half an hour later. 

Pt 2 

It was hard watching the gentle father who quietly packed my lunches for decades be swept away, again and again, by the storms of his mind, somewhere beyond reach. 

I rose each day to summon courage that wouldn’t come. How can we walk through this winding road together when there are shadows only he can pass through? What does it mean to hold out my arms, just as he had for my first steps, when some of these steps have melted flesh from his bones and light from his eyes? 

Pt 3 

We bounced from doctor to doctor—heart, eyes, nose, mouth, ears. A jack-in-the-box winding faster and faster. The more frequent the spells came on, the slower the minutes, hours, days, stretched between waiting rooms. Finally, last December, a neurologist gave my dad a little red pill made to stop what he theorized were seizures. He said with the spells happening from monthly, to weekly, to bi-weekly, dad was winding up for “the big one”. 

Pt 4

A lot of adjustments came with that appointment. Not being able to drive was the big one. My dad talked for years about driving cross country with my mom—the dream of the open road. 

I find him tracing the edges of old photo albums on the ground. He’s packed boxes and boxes for donations. One day, I saw an old friend peeking out from a donation pile - a faded yellow canvas vest lined with a mesh backing. I’ve seen it a million times in photos from before I was born and on all the adventures we went on - hikes, camping trips, the beach. 

Unexpected grief tore through my chest like an anchor hitting the seafloor. He is letting go, and I must let him. Without fanfare, without centering my own loss. Sometimes the things we dream of unceremoniously come to an end, giving way for perhaps sometimes smaller and attainable. Sometimes chapters end mid-sentence, and some pages never begin at all. 

Going, going, gone. 

One day there will be a final goodbye, and these days are the ones I will long for. So we go on, one day at a time, showering the ground with our experiences and memories. 

生命中，犯下不少錯誤。回想起，自己也不能接受、面對自已過去所犯下的錯誤而感羞愧。 

幸運的是，我認識了我的信仰，使我明白、接受自己的不足，坦然接受每個人都會有一些不堪的 過去。 

不過只要坦誠面對、接受自己，真心悔改，才有力量繼續正面地走自己人生的路，而有內心的平 安、喜樂與自由。 

總括經驗，依靠自己的能力智慧絕不可能達到，只有那信仰的力量才可改變一切。

about the poet

Allison Chow is an artist and writer based in the unsurrendered ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, known colonially as Vancouver. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, her practice draws from her studies of visual language, communications and a lifelong passion for disappearing into literary worlds.