I Hope My Dad Dies Today
It is 5:30 AM on the 28th of March as I write this.
My father is asleep in his room, alone. Mouth hung open with deep, heavy breaths that sound like the snores I’ve known all my life. The curtains are drawn and he’s lit by only the soft orange light of a desk lamp atop the dresser next to his bed. It is pitch black outside but the sun is due to rise in the next ten minutes or so. In the next room, my mother and sister are asleep too. I take the nighttime watch in his 24/7 care.
He’s still asleep right now. Alive, but asleep.
My father fell asleep on the afternoon of the 18th of March 2024 and he never woke up.
He never will again.
Let me tell you a fun little story about my dad.
One time, our neighbours had an emergency. There was an elderly woman who had some kind of a stroke and she was passed out on the floor, having fallen from her wheelchair due to what I believe was a stroke. Spoiler alert: she did turn out to be fine, just so you all know.
We lived on a very short street at the time but my father was well known to be a strong man who was a very good, if impatient and angry, driver. Our neighbours immediately started knocking on our gate, alerting my mother and sister. They took turns trying to wake up my father, who was sleeping in that day. They told this story to me when I woke up because I was also sleeping in that day. I think it was a weekend.
They tried to wake him up because our neighbours needed someone to drive the lady to the hospital. My mother had a license but never once tried to drive a car by herself. My sister knew how to drive but was not confident driving the car with such high stakes. I, to this day, have no driver’s license. Dad it is.
Now, if you were the one who had to do this, I’m sure that you would immediately get up to your feet and rush out of the door in your sleep clothes to help this woman, right? She just needed a ride, for God’s sake. It’s the natural, normal, socially acceptable reaction to such circumstances, right?
Not my dad.
My dad sleepily went to the bathroom and proceeded to do his morning routine. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, gargled some mouthwash… the whole morning nine. He changed into decent clothes, stood with his legs far apart while he combed his hair in front of the mirror as that was the only way he could fit into the mirror’s frame, spritzed on his signature perfume, and put on some nice shoes with his fancy shoehorn. It took him roughly twenty minutes and by the time he was done, he put his hands on his hips, and said, “Alright, where’s the patient?”
Reader, the neighbours found the other neighbour who had a car nineteen minutes prior.
When later criticised by literally everyone who heard this story, my father stood by his decisions and reasoned that he couldn’t just get up and out of bed to help this woman because, and this is a direct quote: “The rescuer has to be comfortable.”
Please remember, again, that the elderly woman did end up turning out to be fine so now this is just a funny little anecdote about my father but that story is the perfect way to describe him in a nutshell.
A Taurus Sun, my impatient, stubborn father moved on his own time. He knew what he liked, he moved how he liked, and prioritised his comfort above just about everything — he was the immovable object to the world’s unstoppable force.
Except, perhaps, where I was concerned.
I may be biased.
I’m sure he did this for his other kids too but I’m not speaking for my siblings. This is just how I saw my dad. If they wanted to tell their sides of their childhoods, maybe they should have become writers instead of being medical people. (This is a joke. Their medical knowledge has been everything to the family, these last few months especially and I am just the silly little advertising communications professional who took minutes during doctor’s visits because that’s all I knew how to do.)
And yes, in case you’re wondering, I absolutely just finished listening to “I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy. Phenomenal read, especially as an audiobook. Her title inspired this piece but the similarities between Debra and my dad stop there.
My father was in no way abusive. He had his flaws and shortcomings, sure. But overall, I think my dad did a pretty good job of being my dad.
I’m a few months shy of 30 years old now and the youngest of my dad’s children. My older brother will turn 41 tomorrow. My older sister turned 36 just a few days ago. So growing up, I was always the baby of the family.
Admittedly, I was a little bit of a black sheep, in that I have always been argumentative, but also a little bit of a princess. By the time my parents had me, they’d figured out the kind of parents they wanted to be. My father has always made the joke that I’m the “favourite” kid which he would still reference in the many, many Facebook captions he’d posted over the years for my birthday. In his wallet, there would always be a photo of me in my hand-me-down, sparkly pink dress that my older sister used for her prom, which was then used for my creative shot for my yearbook photo in the sixth grade.
On the morning he had his first seizure, last July 2023, he drove me to my office in the morning, as he would do twice a week.
My dad drove me pretty much everywhere I needed to be whenever he could after he retired. And even when he decided to re-enter the workforce, he would still go out of his way to drive me to my office before he would go to his.
When I was last in England, visiting my brother, he’d arranged for a car service to drive me from Dorset to Heathrow so I wouldn’t have to take the trains. If I were ever at a party or a late dinner with friends, it wouldn’t matter where I was — if I needed a ride home, my father would drive me. If I were ever sick and needed to go to the hospital, my father would always drop everything he was doing and rush over to drive me to the emergency room. We shared our locations with each other on Find My Friends on our phones. Dad just wanted to know where I was and where I was going and if I needed help getting back home.
It never mattered what he was doing. He would be there. It may have taken him a little while — he has his own plans, after all, but I was perfectly comfortable waiting for him to pick me up because in my life, my father never once kept me waiting.
My dad would always show up.
I’m not here to romanticise my father, however. In fact, I believe I inherited my impatience, my rage, my sense of vanity and prissiness, and love of luxury treatment from him. God knows this often became a point of contention between him and my mother — then, me and my mother.
My older brother moved out of the house when he was in college and then later, moved to Singapore and then England, so in my more formative years, it was just the four of us whenever we would hang out as a family.
My mother and sister would often walk next to each other while I would be paired with my dad. Where those two shared a love of aimless window shopping, my dad and I preferred to just get what we came for and go on with our day. We knew what we wanted and then, we would sit by the overpriced coffee chain we both favoured. I had his order memorised and he had my order in his notes app.
Medium drip with steamed non-fat milk and two brown sugars. Yes, mixed already, please.
And then we would sit together and pay attention to our hobbies. At the last few years of his life, my dad loved playing Mobile Legends literally everywhere we went. It didn’t matter if we were just sat at the same café we would always go to on a weekend while we waited for the appropriate time to go up to the cinemas, or on a trip overseas or we’d just finished sightseeing up some mountains, dad would use every single second of free, non-bowling time he had to play his phone game. I swear, I can still hear the echoes of “An enemy has been slain!” when I close my eyes. Meanwhile, when I sat by him, I would take out whatever book I just bought from the store or power up my Kindle and read.
My dad and I were not the kind of people who had to go looking for things we thought we might like, especially my dad. Because of this, I grew to acquire a pretty good sense of my dad’s personality. I knew that he was easily envious if I were to, say, get a new phone — he would immediately want one too. We were the only ones who liked sushi and sashimi in the house so when it came time to raid buffets, we would pretty much leave the newly restocked tuna and salmon sashimi stations decimated. We were starved, wild beasts at those East Asian grill buffets.
If my dad were to ever go shopping, he would simply go to the stores that he liked and tell the people what he was looking for. A crisp, new button-down shirt. A precise bottle of Hugo Boss perfume — or Lacoste, if he was feeling a little bored of that scent. Fancy running shoes or leather Oxfords. If you saw him regularly, you’d know that my father always looked put together.
Whenever my dad walked anywhere, he walked with an air of confidence. He was athletic with a very strong right arm (as he bowled passionately for, I think, longer than I’ve been alive) and was the sole man of the house for over 20 years in a house full of women who did not do any strength training. My dad spent decades in a position of leadership and when he walked, you knew it. Anyone wearing a uniform would give him a little nod whenever he would pass by. Gated villages would always give him a little salute when the barrier was being raised for him.
Before his illness, I never, ever saw my dad weak. Not once. I’d heard stories of his embarrassing drunken escapades where he wasn’t his best self but I’d never seen them.
To me, he always presented himself to be dignified, well-put-together, towering, and strong.
And I believe he preferred it that way.
During his first hospitalisation, he held in his pee for three days.
At this time, they’d already found the mass in his brain and believed it to be a tuberculoma. He was being kept at the hospital for a while yet and he was conscious. He had minor aphasia from the seizure so sometimes, he would use the wrong word than what he wanted to say but for the most part, he was still understandable. He had the little red tag around his wrist that labelled him as a fall risk so we were provided a little bottle that would serve as his urinal because he did not have the all-clear to go to the bathroom.
But little did that hospital know, my dad is also the most stubborn man alive.
Come day three of him holding in his pee, my dad was in agony. He was twisting himself into knots and holding in the pee. The nurses tried to keep him calm but he was thrashing around, begging for permission to please be allowed to get up and relieve himself, alone, in the bathroom. The nurses tried to reason with him and give him options. He was a fall risk, he couldn’t go alone. They’d tried to give him a catheter, a bedpan, and adult diapers. My mother, sister, and I offered to leave the room while a male nurse helped him with the portable urinal. My father vehemently and near-violently refused all of these things.
He said that it was a psychological thing — he would not be able to go to the bathroom if it wasn’t in a toilet, alone. He demanded the small dignity of being able to go to the bathroom on his own and withstood immeasurable amounts of pain to stick to it, even while he was asleep.
In the end, his first neurologist gave in and said that sure, he could go to the bathroom on his own. Only if he promised to take it slow, relieve himself while sitting down, and he would call for assistance when standing back up. Of course, my father didn’t listen to that last part and when it came time to assist him to stand back up, he was already halfway back to bed.
That was how he lived his life even when we found out that his first neurologist and the machine that was 96% certain was wrong. It wasn’t a tuberculoma, actually. It was Stage 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme.
At first, it was only my mother who would help him walk to the toilet.
Then, it was my mother and my sister.
Then, it was both of them helping him to get to the wheelchair so he could be wheeled onto the toilet.
Never me. I reason that this was the only thing I could give him, as the physically weakest person in my family. But also as his youngest child, his only child with no medical training whatsoever. I will not look when he must relieve himself like this.
I can give him this small dignity.
About two weeks before he fell asleep on the 18th of March 2024, he started rejecting going to physical therapy. My mother tried to bargain with him and said, “If you stop going to physical therapy, you’re going to have to be in a diaper 24/7. You don’t want that, right?”
He’d stopped being able to speak sentences by then. He only shook his head.
“So, you’ll go to physical therapy?”
He shook his head again.
“You’ll… you’d prefer the diaper?” my mom asked again.
He nodded.
That was when I knew that the father I knew was already long, long gone.
I knew my dad would die soon.
But apparently, not soon enough.
It’s now 7:34AM as I write this.
My father is sound asleep, as he has been for the last nine days. It’s Maundy Thursday and usually, the family would be getting up early to go visit 7 churches, as is tradition for Semana Santa. But instead, we’re in this little condo, waiting for my dad to pass. None of us can leave for very long, just in case.
He has his mouth wide open and is taking deep, heavy breaths. He gets fed artificial nutrients and fluids every few hours. His once powerful legs are now just bones covered with sagging skin. His pot belly is gone. I watch it every five to ten minutes to see if he’s still breathing because he stops moving for sometimes scary amounts of time before he takes a breath again; that’s something that apparently happens when you’re dying. More you know.
His face is calm as he sleeps, even though every five to ten minutes, the horrifying echoes of what I think are death rattles that sound like drowning, phlegmy coughs that reverberate throughout this little condo we now live in. Sometimes, throughout the day, his jaundiced eyes will open and stare at nothing — or maybe it’s at us. His left hand, the one that isn’t paralysed, is positioned against his heart and he will raise it to his mouth a few times an hour, a day. We don’t know if he can still hear us. I think it’s just his reflexes but my mother thinks he can.
My mother, ever the early bird, has gotten up now. My sister will wake up in about three hours to keep her company and only then will I go to sleep. My mom doesn’t like being on her own with dad for very long, just in case.
When we told his doctors that this was his condition, we were told that he would pass any hour, any day now. We haven’t been able to move since.
It is day nine of our watch of my dad slowly, maybe painfully dying of cancer and it’s brutal. It’s agony. I hate every second that this is what’s happening in my life right now. I’m overcome with unnamable rage and grief and longing for this to just… end.
I know my dad wouldn’t want this either. If he were capable of conscious thought, I know this kind of life isn’t the one he would want to keep on living.
My sister and I have had to call off work but we don’t know how much longer we can keep this up. We tell him a few times a day, “Pahinga ka na, di. Ok lang kami. Pahinga ka na.” (Rest now, dad. We’re ok. You can rest now.)
Tomorrow is our older brother’s birthday. It’s also my older brother’s only son’s birthday.
So I hope my dad dies today.
I know my dad well enough, I think, to believe he would hope the same.
Or I believe that we hope it’s not just not on a day that’s the same day as your kid’s birthday. I hoped the same when it was my sister’s birthday a few days ago.
It won’t be easy when he finally passes, I know that. I know a different kind of grief will flood through me when he passes for real, instead of this dreadful limbo of anticipatory grief that my mom and sister and I have been shackled to, every day, since July. I can’t presume to know what this will feel like for me when he’s really, actually gone.
But I know I’m ready for this part of it to be over.
Please just let this be over.
