This is being published some three-and-a-half years later, with enough distance that I’m okay with it being public now.

I don’t pretend to know an extensive amount about the topic. These are personal viewpoints and experiences. I think no matter what it’s difficult to experience death, especially for an immediate family member even if the relationship fell somewhere between “good” and “bad.”

10 days ago, my father died. This wasn’t a particular surprise. He’d already been in a memory care facility for a year and change, been dealing with pre-Alzheimer’s-like memory issues for more than ten years before that, and about a month ago was taken to the hospital for a fall that broke his hip. While the surgery went perfectly well, he developed pneumonia, an infection that led to sepsis, and a case of MRSA, which ultimately led to us turning him over to hospice care. This didn’t last very long, maybe another week or two after he returned from the hospital. It was enough time for a handful of people to visit before he died.

I have a lot of mixed feelings here. In October 2020 I became a full-time caretaker. Surprise. I got a call from his dentist that he didn’t show up for an appointment. Then I got a call from a hospital telling me he’d been brought there in an ambulance after a fall. During that visit, I was told he had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, which is functionally treated like Alzheimer’s disease and he could not reasonably be expected to take care of himself. With my siblings having previously left New York, it fell to me in the short term—that short term was six months long. I was also taking classes, working intermittently, and now also a full-time caretaker.

I was extremely resentful, the angriest I can remember ever being all the time. I was frustrated at suddenly having to pick up all the pieces of his life that had been forgotten or just fallen apart, having to deal with years and years of cruft and garbage that had never been discarded, about facing the ways in which he chose to not ever make decisions about old and useless stuff or spend any energy on creating space for himself. There were multiple lifetimes worth of collected leftovers that had been piled in boxes and stored. I started cleaning that out two and a half years ago, and it’s still far from done.

When my brother came to drive him down to Texas, to the arranged facility that he’d picked out and liked, I more or less wrote him off. Decided that I wouldn’t see him again. That didn’t quite hold, as I ended up needing more paperwork signed, hoping against hope that he was still cognizant enough to actually pass muster with a Notary. Thankfully, that went well and that was the last time I saw him in person (February 2021). I have a video of him and my Aunt singing happy birthday to me from the end of that year.

Writing this makes me cry. It’s not a “sad, I miss him” cry. It’s a welling up of feelings that I am having trouble parsing as a feeling I recognize. It’s too complicated to describe as a single emotion. Though, I guess “grief” is it. But it’s not remotely simple.