When my daughter had just stepped outside, the doctor gently pulled me aside: ‘It would be best if you let your daughter keep some distance from him.’ My husband started having memory problems about four years ago. Last week, my daughter and I took him to see a neurologist. When she excused herself to go to the restroom, the doctor – his hands still slightly trembling – leaned in and whispered tensely, ‘People in authority… you should talk to them soon, about your daughter…’ Before he could say anything more, she had already come back into the room, her hand gripping something tightly inside her purse.

Before he could explain, she came back into the room, one hand clenched tightly around her leather purse. I never imagined that after sixty-three years of living a quiet Midwestern life, I would find myself sitting in a neurologist’s office at the University Hospital in Iowa City, my heart pounding with a fear I didn’t yet understand. My name is Kathy Cuban, and for the past four years, I’ve watched my husband, Steven, slip away from me piece by piece.

Not through death—that might have been easier to accept—but through the cruel fog of memory loss that settled over his mind like winter frost on our Iowa farmhouse windows.

Steven was seventy when it started. Small things at first.

Forgetting where he’d left his reading glasses. Repeating the same story twice in one evening at Sunday dinner.

Calling our grandson by our son’s childhood name.

I told myself it was normal aging. We all forget things. But then came the morning he couldn’t remember how to start the John Deere tractor he’d driven for forty years, the same green machine that had plowed our three hundred acres of prime Iowa soil through droughts and bumper crops alike.

That was when I knew something was terribly wrong.

Our daughter, Clare, insisted we see specialists. She drove up from Des Moines every few weeks in her shiny crossover SUV, her designer heels clicking across our old pine floors, her perfume—something expensive and floral—filling rooms that usually smelled like coffee, wood polish, and old books.

She meant well, I told myself. She was worried about her father.

But there was something in her eyes during those visits that I couldn’t quite place.

A calculation. A quiet measuring. She would walk slowly through the farmhouse, built by Steven’s grandfather in 1889, and look out across the rows of corn and soybeans like she was appraising them.

I caught her more than once taking photos of the antique furniture with her phone, lingering over the walnut sideboard that had belonged to Steven’s mother.

She asked casual questions about the property deed, whether the land was fully paid off, whether we had any liens. “Mom, you’re both getting older,” she’d say, squeezing my hand with perfectly manicured fingers.

“We need to be practical. Have you thought about power of attorney?

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