Hey there, today's episode is hosted by the poet and writer Victoria Chang.

Hang tight and I'll be back on April 8th. I'm Victoria Chang and this is the slowdown.

I'm Victoria Chang and this is the slowdown. After my mother died, it became harder and harder to take care of my father who'd had a stroke six years prior.

My mother, although sick herself, had still been able to care for him with a little bit of assistance.

Once she died, my father increasingly became a danger to himself and others around him.

For the next seven years, we moved him around from one memory care facility to the next.

Once one called me to say that my father had gone missing and was found on the median of a busy street, confused and lost.

If I think too much about the details of those challenging times, I begin to feel quite sad.

That's when I start thinking about the good times during those hard times,

because there were many good times too. My own memories are

filled with the people I met at those memory care facilities. One of my favorites was Bill, who had once served as the CEO of a large company.

It broke my heart that because of his mental condition he was relegated to just one floor.

I always called him and my father wild horses needing large fields to run in.

At some point, I actually looked forward to seeing Bill. Once he

grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, hey, when are you going to bring around the getaway car?

My father's gibberish also made me laugh because occasionally vocabulary from his decades in the workplace snuck in. Words like briefcase or systems or papers appeared at random times.

Once I shared a meal with another resident and my father. We had an entire conversation about how this man had graduated from college just that morning.

I congratulated him, asked him what he majored in.

His responses never made sense, but somehow that was a deeply memorable conversation.

These experiences showed me that connection isn't necessarily about meaning or comprehension.

It's about something else more primal. Perhaps the pure

humanity that emerges out of talking and interacting with another person.

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