It's been a very long time, but I thought I would post this for anyone wondering what's been running through my head the last couple months:


I was running my hands over his skeletal back, trying to give some comfort to this dying man; my dying father. The skin, hanging off the back of his arms looked more like a victim of Auschwitz than the strong, taught muscles of the man who raised me. His shoulders were hunched. He was trying so hard to breathe. The cancer had moved into his heart, although he didn’t know this yet. Wild wide grey-green eyes searched the room every time he raised his head, looking for…something. I tried to remember every second, knowing it might be one of the last times. I would soon realize, it was.

The doctor came in and told us the news that this was the last. There was no more treatment, the cancer had won. It was causing congestive heart failure and soon the fluid would prove too much for his heart to handle. At least I think that is what she said. I can’t even be sure which doctor came in to speak with us. Perhaps it was his oncologist. Maybe the pulmonologist, I don’t know. It was just my father and me in the room and then the doctor left. Something else had left with her too. Hope maybe? The room just felt emptier.

My welling eyes looked at the back of my father near hairless head. I thought about all the questions I had wanted to ask him; all the stories I wanted to hear from him. And in that moment, I knew I would ask and hear nothing. This was all there was. We were at the end of our road together. I had known I would never again see his happy sun-burst eyes laughing at me from a healthy body, but the reality felt like it had knocked the wind out of me. It was then that he turned to me and said something so simple. There were no choked goodbyes. No regret. He simply turned his head as far over to me as he could and clearly said, “I love you sweetie.” His voice did not falter or crack.

I spent that night watching over him, trying to keep the O2 mask from making him uncomfortable. I wrote letters, I read. I watched the man drift in and out of a doze. And I stayed awake. I stayed awake until my mother came the next morning. And when she did, I laid down to rest my own head. I was grouchy. But I stayed awake until my father signed the DNR forms and the doctor re-told the bad news to rest of the family. And then I went to sleep.

When I woke up, he was asleep, soundly. And I went home, leaving him in the care of my mother. I would not see him awake again. The next time I would come into that room would be 12 hours later. I would walk into a dark room at 2am, my mother asleep on the cot, my father lying still, heavily sedated with morphine. My mother would awake and we would discuss with the nurses my father’s elevated heart rate until, 22 minutes after I arrived, his heart rate would plummet.

The nurses would rally us around his bed and I, holding in one fist my mothers trembling fingers and in the other, my father’s limp hand, we would watch him, through our tears, taking his final few breaths; shallower and shallower until two gasps, turning his head right then left…..and then nothing. The O2 blowing onto a frozen face, his mouth slightly ajar. My father had died. Only the hiss of the oxygen and our sobs were audible.

Eventually we moved to the other side of the room, away from the dead body that had housed the most important man in both our lives. After a string of people filed in and out, doing whatever it is hospital staff does in the event of a death, we left. To the core it felt wrong to do so. Perhaps it was because both of us had not left him alone in over a year. But he was gone. We both knew it. So we held onto each other and walked from the room, out of the hospital and eventually into our house. But from that moment until I found myself sitting in the funeral directors office, I do not remember. A blur of pain, sadness, and a bit of relief was what filled that empty space in time. The relief was to see him out of pain. But that has since faded.

I sit here now and grieve constantly. It washes over me like a tide. It never goes out. Wave upon wave of sadness that I can stave off with constant distraction, but sometimes, not even then. Perhaps one day there will be nothing left of me to crash against and I will simply be part of that great ocean and drift with it for eternity. I hope only that my father may be somewhere in that deep pool and that I might finally be with him again.