"Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose them: the first signs ("I've been having some funny pains in my lower back") followed by the medical sentence (a lung cancer has metastasized to the cerebrospinal canal), and then the wary measuring of the distance between sickbed and bathroom."
"The father dies at 5:17 in the morning, four days before Christmas, and, here again, the journey takes its only shape: "At five o'clock his breathing slowed, with longer intervals between breaths. Inhalation, a pause lasting a second or two or three; exhalation, a long pause; inhalation again, an even longer pause, one-two-three-four, exhalation, and . . . No inhalation followed.""
A son sits vigil at his dying father's bedside, bearing witness to the physical and ritualized stages of decline. Early symptoms give way to a medical verdict of metastasized lung cancer and wary measurements of mobility between sickbed and bathroom. The son pretends to read while keeping restless watch, confronting the intimate awkwardness of a parent's nakedness and the administration of fentanyl patches for pain. The final night is spent lying beside the father, waiting as breathing slows into longer, irregular pauses. Death occurs early morning, the rhythms of breath ending in a prolonged absence of inhalation, with precise sensory detail of timing and ritual.
Read at The New Yorker
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