He had a present for me. My dad was in his late 70s, and his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease started to make sense: familiar anecdotes grew longer even as they also lost details or merged with other anecdotes.

He had a present for me, and he had wrapped it in plain brown paper. My dad was one of those men who when he wanted to tell you something important or give you something, he stood up to do so. I do not know where this touch of formality came from, whether it was a trace of a whiff of a bygone era, something that the top-hatted men one saw depicted in the Victorian elocution primers with which my dad grew up in his childhood home do, or if it is merely a trait shared by men with the last name of “Aldrich.” My grandfather did it, my dad did it, and I tend to stand when I have to tell you something I have decided is important to tell you, too.

He retrieved the package from beside his chair and stood. “I think you should have this,” and he paused. It was an Alzheimer’s pause coupled with some father-son emotions; he couldn’t describe what the package was or how it was meaningful. “This is important.”

My parents and sister lived on Cape Cod. When I returned to New York, I opened the package: It was a large studio photo of my baby sister and me that was taken when she was still an infant; thus, at some time in the fall of 1971. It was newly framed and under glass, though. In the photo I am three, or about to be. I’d seen the photo many times, as it must have been sent around in a variety of sizes to all the cousins and grandparents back in the Christmas season of 1971. I actually had a copy on my Instagram account even when my dad made a gift out of it for me. I’d never seen it framed or so large.

He couldn’t wrap words around why it would be important to me; he just wrapped it in paper and made a gift of it. It sits in a nook on my wall, even today, and it holds a double meaning: it represents my childhood, as this photo always has done, but this particular copy is a personal gift from my father in his last decade, when what was important was only family. “I think you should have this.”

William Robert “Bob” Aldrich died of Covid-19 on May 10, 2020. He was 84.