Woah, the storyline of dementia hits so hard. It's scary. It can be any one of us. We wonder who we would want to make peace with in our old age, or when facing impending death. This is 'The Blight' by Emma Cline, published in The New Yorker on August 9, 2026. This is adapted from the author's recently published novel 'Switzy'.
Protagonist David Hastings is grappling with the onset of dementia. Along with his dedicated assistant Cody, he's traveling to Switzerland for a voluntary-assisted death. Before that, he stops in London to visit his daughter Rebecca, and have one last dinner with her.
David is a flawed character, and hasn't been the best father to Rebecca. He and his ex-wife Annabel divorced when Rebecca was ten. He didn't tell her about his diagnosis. He didn't want her to know. He only said something about retirement. And mentioned about a work project in Zurich. He didn't tell her what he would be doing there in truth. Rebecca didn't quite know how to have a relationship with him. But she tried to be civil.
We don't know if David's cognitive declined allowed him to see more of his life and what remains of it than when he was healthy. At this point, Rebecca only assumed he's retiring, and helpfully sent a string of articles about filling up leisurely hours and reminding him about taking supplements in order to keep healthy and prevent decline. However, he kept his vitamins away in his drawer. "The blight had come for him; it was too late."
Many opportunities to extend the meal. Coffee? Dessert?
To not choose these offered extensions seemed sad, an acknowledgment that the night had been only O.K., that no spark of familial magic had overcome them. And they were as they had always been, stiff with each other, missing the mark.
Like those holiday outings, post-divorce, with itineraries planned out by Annabel. Even at the peak of her anger, she’d remained the wholly capable stage director of everyone’s emotions. Take the girl here, look at these lights, these window displays, there’s a holiday village in the children’s department, get an early dinner reservation at the restaurant on the highest floor—she’ll like the glass elevator.
He’d been grateful. Enormously so.
It seemed to be an awkward meeting. The conversation topics are stilted. He seemed to be out of it. The story ended on a neutral note. Dinner and dessert were all done, and they were about to leave. There isn't a hint that Rebecca is aware of what her father has planned. There isn't an indication that she thinks something isn't quite right with David, at least not from what we have read. It was just another thing, like she would have to meet her father at some point, of which was tonight's meal.
In an interview with the same journal, the author is asked if David and Rebecca had similar ideas about this meeting,
We see the dinner through David’s eyes. Rebecca seems nervous, on edge, unsure how to communicate with him. Do you think that her take on the meal would be different from what he imagines her experience to be?
Who can ever know for sure what another is experiencing? Whatever David imagines is, of course, just his imagining. She brings her own little universe to the dinner, in the same way that David does, and these universes intersect but don’t really illuminate each other in any helpful way. Or maybe there are flashes of it—of genuine understanding—but those are rare. That distance—the difficulty of truly making contact with another person from the limits of the self—interests me as a writer. David is especially marooned, a man of a certain generation in a culture that’s rapidly slipping into illegibility for him.
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