Dad passed away - Stage 4 Pancreatic
I. Fear
7/10/26
Spent the morning at the hospital.
The doctor brought us into a break room to talk about the next steps. The kind of meeting you pray you never have. They told us we’re probably looking at days now with how quickly he’s declining. He’s getting confused. He’s struggling to find his words.
Right before we walked out of my dad’s room to head into that meeting, I walked over to him, kissed him on the cheek, looked him in the eyes, and told him I loved him.
All he could get out was “Everything’s burning”
That broke me.
Later I found out he told my mom he doesn’t want to die.
I know he’s scared.
I am haunted by this.
I could go on and on about what it’s feels like to watch your dad wilt before your eyes with no warning. The closest thing I can compare it to is being handed a stick of dynamite only to realize the fuse is already burning. Before you’ve even had time to process what’s happening, you’re standing eye to eye with inevitability, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
People always ask “What’s your biggest fear?”
Mine changed as I got older. As a kid it was the monster from Scooby Doo. Then cooties. Then the jockeys from Left 4 Dead 2. At one point it was ending up on an episode of My 600lb Life. Eventually I grew into the answer worth most giving…. losing those I love.
I found out there’s something much worse
It’s taking my last breath while the people I love stand around me, forced to watch me suffer. It’s seeing the fear in their eyes while I carry my own. It’s knowing the last thing I leave them with isn’t a memory of who I was, but of my pain.
There is nothing gentle about that.
Watching my dad endure this has changed something in me. The physical pain is awful, but seeing someone you love know what’s happening, fight against it, whisper that they don’t want to die… that’s a different kind of suffering. One that reaches everyone in the room.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same after this, it’s just a matter of learning to live with the pieces of me that will remain empty.
My dad has every reason to be angry, terrified, or defeated. Instead he keeps finding ways to think about us. He keeps fighting through impossible pain. That kind of courage is hard to describe until you’ve witnessed it.
My dad is so much braver than I ever understood. I should’ve told him more often that I loved him. I love him. I always did, and I know he loves me. I’m really proud of him.
II. Loss
7/19/26
My dad passed in the middle of the night.
I went to the hospital so I could sit with him one last time. I wanted to say goodbye, but when I looked at him I couldn’t find whatever part of me was supposed to know how to do that.
I reached for his hand.
I had held that same hand as a little boy without ever thinking about it. It was the hand that taught me, protected me, steadied me through life, and picked me back up whenever I fell down.
This time it was so cold.
No matter how tightly I held it, I couldn’t bring any warmth back to it.
I think that’s the moment it finally became real.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t fall apart.
I didn’t feel much of anything.
Through it all, I was stricken by the greatest strain I’d ever come to know, and what followed was nothing but a hollow emptiness.
People talk about grief like it comes in waves.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it’s the tide pulling everything away until you’re left standing in silence, wondering where your life went.
The room was still.
The machines that had filled it with noise were quiet.
The fight was over.
For weeks I had watched cancer take pieces of my dad from us. His strength. His voice. His appetite. His certainty. It was like watching someone erase a masterpiece one brushstroke at a time while you stood there with no way to stop it.
And then there was nothing left to take.
The hardest part wasn’t that my dad died.
It was realizing the man who had been there my entire life was suddenly somewhere I could no longer reach.
No phone call.
No hug.
No I love you.
Just memories that now carry a weight they never had before.
I keep replaying moments that seemed ordinary when they happened.
Conversations I thought we’d have again.
Days I assumed there would always be more of.
You never know you’re living one of the last chapters until someone closes the book. If this has taught me anything, it’s that love has a terrible habit of revealing its full weight only after loss.
I wish I had one more morning.
One more conversation.
One more chance to tell him how proud I am to be his son.
Not because he didn’t know.
Because I needed him to hear it again.
Cancer took my father’s life.
It did not take the example he left behind.
His resilience.
His kindness.
His willingness to think about everyone else while enduring pain that most people cannot imagine.
Those things remain.
They live in the people who loved him.
Including me.
I don’t know what healing looks like from here.
Right now, I don’t even know if I want to use that word.
Some losses don’t heal.
They become part of you.
You don’t move on from them.
You move forward with them.
I don’t know how long that will take.
I only know that I miss my dad.
I always will.
III. Everything After
8/15/26
We’re approaching almost a month
I keep writing that sentence as if repetition might make it behave…. less foreign, less grounded in reality, yet it refuses to soften.
It remains exact.
Unforgiving in its grammar.
I understand it.
That’s the worst part.
I was there when it became true.
There is a version of my family’s life that ends that day , and then there is everything that continues in spite of that ending.
Im not quite sure what to call the second part yet.
‘After’ feels too clean.
Too willing to move on.
You’d think the hardest moment would be the moment itself.
But it wasn’t.
The hardest part is the persistence of everything that refuses to change.
Morning still arrives without hesitation.
People still go to work.
Somewhere, someone is on the phone with corporate going ballistic about how their DoorDash driver forgot their side of ranch.
And he’s still gone.
There is a particular violence in that contrast.. the way the world continues to behave as if nothing has been removed from it.
You expect interruption.
A fracture in the sky.
A pause in the machinery of ordinary things.
Some visible acknowledgment that a life has been taken out of circulation.
Instead time just… clears its throat and moves forward.
Tuesday becomes Wednesday without asking permission.
Wednesday becomes Thursday without noticing what its stepping over.
Eventually, even the questions stop coming.
Not because people stop caring.
Because language runs out of ways to hold something it was never designed to hold.
I am fine.
I am not fine.
Both statements sit inside me without contradiction.
Grief is not an emotion anymore.
It is a condition.
Something ambient.
Something that does not announce itself until it does.
Most days it is quiet enough to mistake for absence.
Then something small interrupts the illusion.
A sound.
A smell.
A sentence that lands at the wrong angle.
Slinging off some of my saucy quips or knee slapping one timers that would make him wince out of second hand embarrassment.
And for a fraction of a second, my mind still reaches for him with the confidence of habit.
There is no pain in that moment.
Only the correction that follows it.
That is where it lives now…. in loss.
Not in a single event, but in the constant undoing of reflex.
There is a cruelty to that repetition.
Not dramatic.
Not cinematic.
Precise. Mechanical.
Absence wills itself onto you by refusing to stop happening.
The first loss is the death.
After that, it becomes smaller and more frequent.
You lose him in the middle of good news.
You lose him in the middle of silence
You lose him in places he should have been, and in places he never knew existed.
You lose him in the distance between what you are becoming and what he last saw.
Time used to feel directional.
Like it was carrying me toward something.
Now it feels like something else entirely.
Not forward.
Not backward.
Just away.
That day is already beginning to lose its edges.
It is becoming ‘a month ago’
Soon it will become ‘last year’
Eventually it will become ‘10 years ago’ and a sentence lll say without feeling the full weight of it like I once did.
That is what I cannot accept, even though I know it will happen anyway.
There will be movie nights where the 3 of us fall asleep a few minutes after hitting play and he won’t be there to make fun of us.
There will be versions of us that will never be introduced to him.
Little versions of my brother and myself that he’ll never get to hold and help mold in their upbringing.
There will be moments when I instinctively turn toward him in my mind, only to find nothing there that can answer.
And one day, I will be older than he ever was in my memory of him.
That thought does not land like sadness.
It lands like distortion.
Like something in the architecture of time refusing to align correctly.
When you are a child, your parents are not people in the same way you are.
They are structure.
They are certainty.
They are the reason the world does not collapse when you do not understand it.
They know how to fix things.
They know how to get you home.
They know which problems are real and which ones are not.
You mistake that for permanence.
Then slowly, you learn the truth that was always there…
They were never permanent.
Only earlier in the story.
I wish I had understood that without needing to lose him to see it clearly.
I would have asked different questions. I would have listened without assuming repetition. I would have paid attention to the ordinary things I thought would always be available to me later in life.
Grief is not interested in revisions.
It only offers hindsight with perfect clarity and no ability to use it.
So I am left with the ‘what ifs’ that do not resolve into anything useful unless I force them to change shape.
I am trying to do that.
Not erase them.
Reassign them.
‘I would have’ becomes ‘I will’
I will say what matters while it can still be received.
I will stop treating time as something that owes me another chance.
I will try to become someone my father would recognize without explanation.
And I will speak about him.
Because I am beginning to understand that memory is not passive.
It is not something that happens to you.
It is something you continue to do.
To remember him is more than comfort.
It is refusal.
A refusal to let death have the final word on what his life meant.
Death took what it could take.
But it did not take everything.
It cannot reach backward into meaning.
My father still exists in the residue of what he left behind.
In the way I phrase things without realizing it.
In the instincts I mistake for my own.
In the way I respond to people and sometimes realize the response belonged to him before it belonged to me.
In the parts of me that feel inherited rather than chosen.
Sometimes I notice one of those moments and it stops me.
Not because it is surprising.
Because it is familiar in a way I can no longer place.
Maybe that’s the only version of moving forward that is not a lie.
It isn’t departure, just continuation with weight.
I still return to that hospital room.
I think about the fear he must’ve felt knowing he’d soon part ways with the lake, the dogs, and the family he was responsible for creating.
I am trying to understand something I could not understand then…
Those final weeks were not the sum of him.
They were the end of his life, not the definition of it
Before the beginning of the end, there was a man who lived a full life and in the fast lane (and somehow never got a speeding ticket)
He laughed in ways I can still hear (and wince at if it’s that one infamous cackle and honk I’m thinking about) if I try.
He loved in ways I am still learning how to recognize.
He got angry.
He forgave.
He failed.
He tried again.
He showed up in ways I did not always know how to appreciate while I had the chance.
He was not the ending, but the entire rest of it.
If I am honest, I would choose this pain again over a life in which I never knew him at all.
That is the part that does not make sense until it does.
Love does not negotiate for safety.
It only guarantees consequence.
Eventually, someone is left holding the absence of the other.
This time, it’s me, its my mom, its my brother
I hate it.
But I also understand it.
I am grateful for the fact that he never had to learn what it feels like to remain here without me, my mom, or my brother in this world.
We will carry that imbalance for him.
We miss you.
We are still here.
We are still trying.
And if there is any way for what you gave me to continue beyond my own life, I will spend the rest of it trying to make sure it does.