Dying is Inevitable. Accepting This Takes Practice.
Helping my child die was not about hanging on. It was about letting go
About seven years and a lifetime ago, I spoke to a hospice coordinator for the first time. It was a call I had managed to put off until I had a very meaningful conversation with a friend who’d lost her son to cancer.
We connected at a rehearsal for a show our girls were performing in together. Her daughter, who’d been 8 when her brother died, was in the same music program as my daughter, Ana. This woman knew about my family and I knew about hers, but we’d never spoken before that day.
Our first conversation lasted over two hours and took place behind the music building where our girls were rehearsing. I told her how sick Ana was, how her oncologist said there was nothing more he could do, and how there was no way to know how much time Ana had.
My new friend, who had been through this exact scenario six years earlier when her son was 16, advised me to reach out to hospice before Ana got any sicker. “You want to be prepared for everything,” she’d said.
And so I called hospice and started the conversation by asking a few not-so-hard questions.
