My diagnosis opened the door to my writing and has helped give voice to the creation of a blog. I write for therapy and to inspire my kids but also to hopefully inspire others around me. My writing has led to occasional emails from my readers, such as one I received from a young woman. She explained how in 2019 she moved a few hundred miles from her parents, her friends, and her hometown to start a new job.

Things were going well until Covid came to town, the economy crumbled, and she lost her job. She said she missed home but handled things surprisingly well. She took a part-time job and enrolled in online college courses. Then on a warm October morning, just before she left for work her mom called. Dad had died.

The passing of a loved one is a traumatic event that can leave a void and affect our own journeys, but other times life can alter us so subtly we almost never realize it happened.

The other night, the kids and I huddled around Cindy’s iPhone and watched a family video from 2014. Dylan was just a year old, and like him, my brain disease was in its infancy. Dylan, on a pair of chubby legs fitted with Velcro sneakers, stared into an open refrigerator, bounced up and down, talked gibberish to the butter, and waved a chocolate chip cookie in his right hand like a magic wand.

Dylan turned from the fridge. His cheeks jiggled with baby fat, his hair was thin and unstyled, yet his eyes were a bright and mesmerizing blue. He staggered toward the phone and yelled something. He waved the cookie and flapped his arms like he might take flight.

Then my voice, loud and clear, boomed across the video, “Dylan, what do you got?”

The chest of his gray jumper was puddled black with drool, and Baby Dylan waved the cookie and shouted gibberish that sounded like, “Abracadabra.”

Dylan, who now is days away from turning nine, looked away from the phone and toward me. His hair is now styled with gel and the baby fat has disappeared, but his eyes are still the same sparkling blue, and they looked at me as he said, “Dad, your voice is so different now.”

Doctors discovered my brain disease six weeks after Dylan was born. He is my timeline. My son’s growth parallels my atrophy. I once wrote, “Your voice is the most powerful thing you own.” And the problem with putting your thoughts on paper is you’re forced to either accept your own advice or become a hypocrite.

The progression of my disease has breached my voice. I can’t understate how taxing this has been on my spirit. I’ll admit I’ve avoided taking and making phone calls. Avoided talking to strangers. Avoided interjecting quips and witty banter in rolling conversations. I’ll admit, at times, I’ve been a hypocrite.

“Dad, your voice is different.”

Dylan’s observation waves a wand, and a familiar sentence is pulled like a rabbit from a hat: Your voice is the most powerful thing you own.

Different and wrinkled and damaged, I thought, but still the most powerful thing I own. This process of rediscovering my voice, the one I’m now sharing so confidently with the world, has been a character-building experience to say the least.

At the end of the email, the woman apologized for “stalking” my blog but explained that reading it is comforting. “Even though he’s been dead for a few years,” the young woman wrote, “sometimes your words jostle my dad’s words. Through your voice I can hear the echoes of his voice. Kind of like magic.”

Humbly, I drafted a structured reply email with paragraphs and punctuation marks. Before I sent it, I thought about the human voice. How amazing it is. A tool. A gift. How it evolves from drooling gibberish to articulating coherent and complex ideas. And how a person’s voice, the rhythms, the inflections are solely unique to themselves. And how a voice is forever. And how beyond death, a person’s voice sings about the ether until the internet’s door swings open or a home video is played and the past interrupts the present. And how when you listen to voices of the past, they can suspend time. Logic ends. Belief begins. Like an illusion. Like magic.

I deleted the draft and simply responded with:

Dear____________,

Abracadabra.