My dad's dementia has taken away his stutter. Although I'm sure he doesn't miss it, I do.

My dad's dementia has taken away his stutter. Although I'm sure he doesn't miss it, I do. Just a vent post. I'm not sure why I'm posting here, I just feel like stuttering is such a particularly-nuanced experience, and in a way stutterers might understand this situation, or at the very least understand my dad. Please note I'm writing this through the lens of my father who grew up perceiving stuttering as a "bad" thing, although I personally feel quite differently about it. Is this a privileged perspective? Am I disrespecting the years of social trauma my dad endured because *I* "miss" it? I'm sure if he was more cognizant he'd jokingly tell me to get fucked, lol. He's in his 70's, and was a child in the 50's. His dad would mock his stutter at the dinner table and call him an idiot (and died a few years later, so they never got to work it out). His parents would send him away from Toronto to a stuttering school in Rhode Island to get "fixed". His principal thought it was useless to teach a stutterer. When I did a stint in journalism school I interviewed him on his experiences, and his overwhelming thought growing up was that he "wished people would get over it". He didn't wish that *he* could overcome his stutter. He wished people around him would accept him. What a boss. As an adult he refused to go through drive-thrus. He hated the post-office because his stuttering school sent the boys to the post-office weekly to test their speech (small-talk). Once when I was 16 I told him that stuttering wasn't a real handicap, and he got so angry he pulled over the car when we were downtown and made me take the subway home (otherwise a gentle man). Anytime I didn't want him around to meet my friends (typical teen), he would shamefacedly ask me if it was because of his stutter. My cousin once told me when she was kid, she thought he affected a stutter to be kind to her, which is a lovely sentiment. To be honest, I barely noticed his stutter growing up. But I definitely notice its absence. I'm sitting here trying to remember the sound of my dad's voice pre-dementia and it's making me so sad. My mom died when I was a kid so his voice did all the raising and the bedtime stories and the "good night, don't let the bed bugs bite, if they do, beat them black and blue" mantras. His voice is now gravelly and raspy, but unbroken and clear. To be clear, he had a severe kind of stuttering where his tongue and lips would get trapped on a consonant for a solid minute, ticking like a broken record, while his mind was frantically looking for an alternate word choice to escape the verbal paralysis (I'm convinced this is the reason he's so good at word puns, with all that mental mapping). He's had a great life. Got his masters, became a librarian manager, married a woman he genuinely loved (who not once during their entire partnership commented on his stutter), raised 6 kids alone after her death. Again, just a boss. My dad's stutter was, in his opinion, the biggest obstacle in his life. None of us predicted it would just.. melt away like it never happened. An emotional mountain cut down to a molehill and he doesn't even get to cognitively perceive the world with these new lens. I feel sad for him, but I feel sad for me too. It's hard watching dementia strip all the tiny nuances that describe "dad". I just miss his voice.