Have you ever watched someone pass away?
I don’t mean “heard about it later.” Not “gotten the call.” Not “arrived after the fact to sit with the body already still.”
I mean actually watched.
Have you been present, sitting there as a body fails in real time? Have you watched the chest rise and fall, then rise less, then not rise at all? Have you watched?
Watched the color leave. Watched the mouth go slack. Watched the person you love leave the room while their body is still in it.
Have you watched them die?
Because I have. And I’ve reached a place in the understanding of my own grief and my own process where I genuinely don’t care how uncomfortable it makes people to hear about it.
Why?
Because it’s coming for all of us, and that doesn’t have to be a dark thing. But if you don’t really look at and hold onto that, you are not actually living. You’re just taking your life for granted.
That makes ME uncomfortable, because I know what it is actually costing you and every person who loves and cares for you.
The Caregiver
It started early for me. Around the age of seven I was already helping care for my two grandmothers. The tasks were small at first. I fetched things they needed, sat quietly beside them, and began learning the quiet rhythms of bodies that required more than they could still give themselves.
One of them died when I was twelve. The closest one, the woman who felt like my best friend across generations, died when I was sixteen. By then the pattern had already taken root in me. When people started failing, I stayed close. I learned young that love sometimes looks like showing up for the hard, unglamorous parts that no one else wants to claim.
The First Adult Responsibility
My father lived for years with diabetes, and in 2008 he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I was far less present for the long, slow decline than I would later become for others. That changed when a diabetic incident led into a seizure and stroke combination that put him into a coma.
I stayed at the hospital until he died. I really did not have a choice, not that I would have chosen any differently. My mother was already so impaired, though still undiagnosed, that the decisions fell to me. I was thirty-six, but I found myself in a position of responsibility and decision-making that I do not believe any of us is ever truly prepared for. I expected it someday because of what I had seen in my childhood. I did not expect it to begin so young.
With my father, I could not look away. I watched the nurses do the suctioning, the turning, the careful management of tubes and skin. I learned the practical language of end-of-life care in real time. When the paperwork was signed and they finally turned the machines off, I was there. The ink on the consent form was hardly dry before he died.
He was the first death I was fully present for as an adult. I was holding his hand, and when he died his cool, still arm cradled my head as I laid over onto him at his bedside. Something in me rearranged itself permanently that night, and in the week that followed.
Cancer
Cancer is not one disease. It is a thief with many faces, and I watched two of them up close.
My best friend had stage IV metastatic colon cancer that had moved into her brain. It began with a headache after she bumped her head, something so ordinary it almost felt dismissible. By the end it was the worst part of the entire journey. The tumor warped her. It damaged her mind in ways that felt more violent than the physical wasting. The woman I had known for years began to disappear while her body was still here. There were personality shifts, confusion, and moments of pure terror when she could not find the words or the logic or the self she used to be.
This became the foreshadowing of what was to come with my mother, and my first true foray into a special kind of grief. It is the kind of grief where you grieve someone while they are still breathing, and you lose them in the most subtle pieces before the final piece falls away.
Then there was the man I called my guru. Prostate cancer was the culprit for him, and the pain was constant and mean. Have you ever heard someone say, “I just cannot get comfortable”? This was that, times ten thousand. Eventually his kidneys began to fail. That was the worst part as the caregiver.
My most vivid memory from that experience is the catheter. Always the catheter… Changing it. Draining it. Watching the bag fill and refill with blood rather than urine. The smell of infection and a body fighting a war it was slowly losing filled the room. I cleaned. I emptied. I wiped. I watched strength leave him in increments. The metallic, sour scent that settled into that space still has not left me. Others do not notice it, but even years later I still do.
Some cancers do not kill with drama. They grind a person down until the simplest bodily functions become the entire battlefield. That is what happened to him. Thank God for morphine.
Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s is its own special hell. It does not take a person quickly. It takes them in layers.
First the short-term memory. Then the names. Then the ability to sequence simple tasks. Then the recognition of the people who love them. Then the body itself begins to forget how to swallow, how to walk, how to stay continent, how to stay present. By the end you are caring for someone who no longer knows who you are, who may fight you out of fear or confusion, whose body is still producing waste and need while the person inside has already mostly left.
The details are ugly. The diapers. The pureed food. The nights of agitation. The way the eyes can look right through you. The slow, humiliating erosion of dignity that no amount of gentle care can fully prevent. I lived that with my mother. She died in September 2020. I was forty-one, nearly forty-two.
I learned from that experience what it means, and how, to truly “show up.” Alzheimer’s forces you to keep showing up for someone who can no longer show up for you. It teaches a particular loneliness, the loneliness of loving a body that once belonged to the woman who raised you, while that body no longer answers to her.
Watching Them Die
To answer my own question, yes. I have watched someone pass away. I have watched a body fail. I have sat through the final changes in breathing, the cooling of the skin, the moment the presence leaves and only the shell remains.
There were different diseases. Different timelines. But there was the same irreversible truth. Once you have stayed until the end, you carry a knowledge most people never have to hold.
That is the different kind of pain. Not the missing that comes later. The witnessing. The staying. The full sensory record of a life ending while you refuse to look away.
Closing Thoughts
I have written this post because I have been angry. I have been angry because I have found myself, again, experiencing harsh moments of grief throughout July, my father’s month, while being witnessed by people who are only now discovering the depths of my transparency. That experience has surfaced the following message in me for those who know this reality:
Do not let anyone tell you about your grief.
Do not let them decide how long it should last, what it should look like, when you should be over it, or how you are supposed to speak about what you lived through. They were not in the room. They did not do the work of caregiving, or hold the hand that went still. They do not get to narrate your experience back to you.
The caregiver calling on my life was, and is, real. What these experiences did to me were, and will always be, real. The anxiety and fear, from a human perspective. The exhaustion of compassion and empathy on a heart that never seemed to be able to take a depth breath. The abandonment trauma. The chronic lack of support while I was in the thick of it.
And, the way people now look at me sideways and call me intense, or dark, or weird, or a lot. Yes. I am. I own it. I am it. Proudly. Because I have seen things and carried things, alone, that most people would not even want to watch in a Hollywood film or a Lifetime Sunday movie, much less live through in their own kitchen, their own bedroom, or their own hospital chair at three in the morning.
So yes, I talk about it. I write about it. I process it out loud. I keep the lessons. Because at the end of every life is death, and one day you will face it, whether it is someone you love or your own mortality.
You can keep the blindfold on if you want. You can stay inside the fantasy that you are in control and that life is not messy and extremely hard. Congratulations if you have been lucky enough to keep that blindfold in place.
Some of us had it ripped off. We do not get to pretend anymore. And we will not apologize for the way that changes a person.