Dying is Inevitable. Accepting This Takes Practice.

Helping my child die was not about hanging on. It was about letting go

Jacqueline Dooley
The Memoirist
Published in
7 min readAug 9, 2023

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White feather floating on top of a grey murky body of water.
Photo by Author

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.

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Jacqueline Dooley
The Memoirist

Essayist, content writer, bereaved parent. Bylines: Human Parts, GEN, Marker, OneZero, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Pulse, HuffPost, Longreads, Modern Loss