Episode 03
The Name in the Bible
A woman moves home to care for her father's failing memory and discovers, over six ordinary weeks of pill organizers and daylight kitchen visits, that his one “confused” story — about a baby sister she never had — is the only true thing left in the house.
She's a retired teacher, sixty-one, and she arrives at her father's house on the second of April with a suitcase and a schedule: pill organizers, doctor's appointments, the slow patient work of caring for a man whose memory is going. It's daylight work in a sunlit kitchen — nothing about it belongs in a story like this, which is what she'd tell you first.
Her father is sharp about the deep past and lost in the present, the ordinary cruelty of the disease. But there's one story he keeps returning to — about a baby sister. She never had a baby sister. The family has always waved it off as confusion, and here's the thing she can't wave off once she's living in the house with it: dementia doesn't usually keep a story consistent. This one never changes. Not a detail, not a name, not the weather in it.
Then she opens the family Bible to settle it — the register of births and deaths in the front, four generations of the family's own handwriting — and finds that someone, decades ago, went to a great deal of trouble over one of its lines. After that, the question stops being whether her father is confused. It becomes what everyone else in the family agreed to be confused about, and for how long.
Spoiler-light synopsis — the rest airs Tuesday and Friday nights.