I forgot my daughter’s face for three seconds

Dear Delyara, My daughter died nine years ago, and this morning I woke from a dream knowing she had been in it but unable to see her face. I could remember her yellow dress, her hands, the gap between her front teeth, but her face would not come together. For three seconds, maybe four, I felt absolute terror. Then the image returned: the curve of her eyebrows, the small scar near her chin, the expression she made when she was trying not to laugh. I spent the rest of the day looking through photographs, as though memory were an employee I had caught making a mistake and needed to supervise closely. My husband says forgetting one detail does not mean we are losing her. He has begun accepting that memory changes. I have not. Grief has already taken her body, her voice in the present, and every future version of her. I cannot bear the idea that time will now begin taking the past as well. Tonight, I am writing down everything I remember: how she pronounced “spaghetti,” the smell of her schoolbag, the way she slept with one foot outside the blanket. I know paper cannot preserve a person. I am writing because fear needs a job.