After my dad’s dementia was confirmed, I reached out to a friend whose father also has dementia to ask for tips. Her biggest suggestion was to meet him where he is at, and to not ask him questions that made him feel stupid (by asking him what he remembered) but instead to fill the conversation myself. You could even read aloud to him, she said. And there I had my answer: books have long been a way my dad and I connected. He always encouraged me to write and to read.

A book we had shared years ago was the novel, Watership Down. I borrowed a copy from a friend and brought it with me to visit. The first night I was there, my father grew anxious because the television was loud and bright so I showed him the book and asked if he’d like me to read to him. He wasn’t sure, but my mom suggested we could read a chapter.

As I started to read to him, I felt concerned: should I dumb down the diction or should I read to him as I read to my kids when they were young, using the big words so that they learned them in context? I also realized I was taking an enormous risk with reading this story once I plunged in, that perhaps I should have read ahead, because the story is about rabbits whose lives are characterized by risk and fear and violence, aspects that have been dimensions of my father’s recent life. But, I also thought, the flip side of the risk was that in telling the story, perhaps I was saying to him as others would not (and I could not in my own words) that he was not wrong, that the world was indeed scary and violent at times, but that if it could be told in a story, if others had been there, there was both empathy and also possibility of contextualizing that, that a scary episode was not the end.

It made me think of what stories do, and I thought in the moment in the movie The Princess Bride where the narrator says that when Westley was saying ‘as you wish’ what he was really saying was ‘I love you.’ That was what this felt like: I was telling a fictional story about fear and threat to a little group of rabbits who could face the danger bravely, but I was also creating a place for him to encounter the big questions and feelings of life.

The story worked on me, too. The scene was at the end of the fifth chapter, when the little rabbits are weary and anxious. The way they felt—“they had been in severe anxiety. Some of them were almost tharn—that is, in that state of staring, glazed paralysis that comes over terrified or exhausted rabbits, so that they sit and watch their enemies…approach to take their lives”—was a decent description of my father’s general state the previous weeks. The leader of the little group of rabbits knows the rabbits need to rest from their journey but also that “if they lay brooding, unable to feed or go underground, all their troubles would come crowding into their hearts, their fears would mount, and they might very likely scatter.” He asks a rabbit he knows to be a good storyteller to “tell us a story.” I almost started to cry when I read about that storyteller who “realized what it was that Hazel was asking him to do. Choking back his own fear of the desolate, grassless woodland, the before-dawn-returning owls that they could hear some way off…he began. “Long ago, Frith made the world…”

The story of that storyteller moved me—my own experience of catharsis—to choke back my fear of seeing my father reduced and to tell a story of creation, a story that ended with the rabbits who can “come out of their holes and feed and play in his sight, for they are his friends and he has promised them that they can never be destroyed.”