I should have started journaling my way through this 9 months ago. That was when he was first diagnosed, in October 2024. Aggressive liver cancer. I don’t remember if it sunk in right away. Probably not, considering I’m not entirely sure it’s sunk in still yet today, in August 2025.
10 years ago, he wouldn’t have made it this long. To be quite honest it’s a medical miracle he has lived this long anyway, since the big breakthrough of immunotherapy that has extended the lives of many liver cancer patients actually backfired on my dad and gave him Myasthenia Gravis, effectively ending his cancer treatment as soon as it had begun.
Since February, when the MG set in, it has been a progressive deterioration. It wasn’t really until April that the doctors explained what would need to happen if there was any hope left. Maybe one day I’ll have the energy to write it down again, the actual medical details of how my father’s life has been ending.
But for now I just want to establish a place I can empty everything I want to scream. The many ways this entire process, things that happened to my parents and between my parents long before any of this, some of it long before they ever met each other, that has contributed to this being far harder on all of us than it would be if my parents were different people. Had a different sort of marriage.
My brothers and I are not just coping with our dad dying. We’re coping with having parents who are toxic to each other and should probably have gotten a divorce a long time ago; instead one of them is dying and the other is begrudgingly, resentfully providing care for them. The hardest part of being there to help provide care — for both of them, as my mother herself is dealing with an intense need for a hip replacement and all the pain that comes with that, while trying to help my dad with basic daily essentials — is the way they’re treating each other.
The hardest part of this isn’t losing my dad. I wish that could be the hardest part, because it has already been deeply traumatizing, to watch him wither away and know that I already miss him, in spite of all the things about him that drive me crazy.
The hardest part is that I am angry with both of my parents through this process. For different reasons but somehow the same reason. With my dad for still desperately insisting on completely controlling everyone and everything around him, to the detriment of the very people who are trying to be there for him. With my mom for not being able to at least feign some kindness or compassion for him in the way she talks to him. With so much more that I might go into in the future, because right now it all just feels like too much.
There is no silver lining. There is only more to worry about.
My mother has been telling me how grateful and proud she is of me for how strong I’ve been, how mature I’ve been, how much I’ve stepped up to take care of them both when she feels completely adrift and paralyzed.
The truth is, a piece of me wishes I had never let on that I could handle some of this. Because now it feels like if I fall apart, so will everything else.
And all I want to do is punch my pillow and scream and cry about how outrageously fucked up all of it is.
I am running out of rope.
Survival Mode 