I Lost My Dad. These Are The 7 Words I Wish I'd Never Been Told At His Funeral.

"The most vivid memory I have of my dad's cancer treatment is a silent one. In it, we are alone in a dark, curtained room just off the emergency ward. I no longer remember why ― some complication related to his colon cancer, which seemed to mutate as quickly as we could consult doctors. It was cancer in one place, then two. It was stage 1, stage 4, seesawing back and forth depending on whom we asked."

"It is late at night in the hospital room, and my dad is unconscious. There's something intimate and uncomfortable about watching him sleep in the thin hospital gown, all emotion scrubbed from his face. I'm 22, and I have been utterly calm since the diagnosis came less than a year ago. I've had to be. Watching his chest rise and fall, I slow my own breathing, matching it to his. We commune like this,"

"He died at home, on the same couch on which we'd watched hockey and HGTV and shared nachos with exactly one topping (cheese). Summer air drifted inside through the screen door to the backyard, which we'd left open at his request, "so I'll have somewhere to go." He opted for medically assisted death - and in a different context, there's plenty I could say about how important that was for him and for all of us."

An individual recounts a silent hospital memory sitting with an unconscious father during his rapidly changing colon cancer course. Treatments including chemo, radiation, and surgery produced temporary remissions while diagnoses fluctuated between stage 1 and stage 4. At age 22, the narrator matched breaths with the father in a dark hospital room, aware those moments were limited. The father later died on July 12, 2017, at home on the couch during a rainy day. He chose medically assisted death so he could leave while he still felt like himself, which the family experienced as a blessing.

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