My three-year-old called me to watch her flip this morning. “Watch me, Daddy, watch!” – that eternal refrain of childhood, her small body launching into a somersault on the bed, fearless and proud. By lunch, I was watching my father try to lift a spoon to his mouth, his hand awkward and strained to find coordination with the effort. When did that become hard? Tuesday? Two weeks ago? These things slip away without announcement.

This is my calendar now: firsts and lasts, running parallel through the same house, the same day, the same exhausted body that pivots between them. My daughters’ milestones arrive with fanfare – first words, first steps, first day of school. We anticipate them, camera ready, marking time forward. My father’s lasts are quieter, noticed only in retrospect. The last time he signed his name. The last time he transferred himself to bed. The last time he remembered what I told him five minutes ago.

The cruel asymmetry of it: I know exactly when my three-year-old took her first independent step – it was a Thursday, captured in memories and photos. But my father’s last independent step? It was just another Tuesday, unremarkable until it never happened again.

There’s a quantum quality to these lasts – Schrödinger’s actions, both typical and final until time reveals which they were. Every meaningful conversation could be our last memorable exchange. Every political chat or conversation about plans for the following day might be the final one he truly understands. But you don’t know, can’t know, until weeks pass and you realize that particular ability has quietly left the building.

The physical decline has been a boulder rolling downhill for years, picking up speed. Now the cognitive boulder is catching up, and I find myself repeating things, watching recognition flicker and fade. He still knows me, still cracks jokes, still shows flashes of the charming, selfish, complicated man he’s always been. But ask him what he had for lunch yesterday, what we talked about twenty minutes ago, and more often than not, there’s nothing. The short-term memory dissolves like sugar in water.

My daughters are building themselves, accumulating capabilities like treasures. The little one conquering the trampoline with each bounce and flip, drawing circles she insists are letters. The older one occasionally making her own lunch now, taking on fun projects without instruction, needing me less each day. My father is being edited down, reduced to core functions, then less. His independence didn’t leave all at once – it’s seeping away like water through cupped hands. I witness both trajectories daily, hourly – the harsh switch from celebrating to mourning and back again, ad nauseam.

Yesterday, my three-year-old perfected a new flip on our king size bed she uses like a trampoline. Today she’s outside on the trampoline bouncing higher, braver. My eleven-year-old abandoned her post-surgical crutches two weeks early, determined to heal faster – didn’t ask, just told me she was better. My father couldn’t figure out if it was morning or evening, kept looking at the window for clues that weren’t there.

I catalogue these changes constantly now, never sure which ones matter. The grip strength that’s weakening. The pills not taken as they should be. My daughter’s new independence. Her sister’s fearless bouncing. Everything shifting, accelerating – firsts and lasts tumbling over each other, and I can’t tell which moments I should be memorizing.

Tomorrow my three-year-old will try something new that might scare me. Tomorrow my father might not know where he is again. I won’t know which until it’s already happened.