I lost my father 3 months ago to colon cancer, on October 29. But I think he actually tried to die alone two weeks before that, on October 16. By then our family’s hospital routine was that my mother would spend the night in the hospital and then me and my sister would trade off on time spent during the day; that morning, in the brief moment in which my mother went to the bathroom and then called me to let me know my sister and I should get ready to come over, he went into respiratory failure. She came back to a hospital bed surrounded by all manner of medical professionals, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, everyone. He survived that crisis, but had to be transferred to the ICU, where he died two weeks later with all of us in the room.

He was such a private person, and those 2 weeks in the ICU were so grotesquely vulnerable, that there’s a part of me that feels like something got taken away from him in that endeavor to keep him alive past the point where he first made the decision to go. But reading a piece such as yours, so beautifully and terribly honest, staring so unflinchingly at the raw truth of what happened in that final period with your mother, has made me realize that perhaps no matter how it happened I would have felt this anger. Perhaps this is just the resulting feeling from watching a parent descend into that terrible darkness, and it wouldn’t matter so much how he left us in the end, because the crazy-making injustice of the indignities he suffered for months beforehand, and often in front of us — the last thing he ever would have wanted as our father — might be the true seeds of my rage.

Thank you for putting the truth of death, especially death from cancer, out in the world. And thank you, even more, for sharing your brilliant, fiercely loving and fighting to the end mother with all of us.