Death of a Father, a Doctor

This beautiful essay by James Marcus in the New Yorker tells the story of his father's last days.

Everything I have described so far seems to have happened to somebody else—to somebody else’s father. But the death of a parent happens to you, and, once it starts, it never stops. It dislodges everything. “Is he sick?” my friend Peter asked me a few days after my father drank from the invisible cup. “Or is he dying?” At that moment, it occurred to me with absolute certainty that he was dying, and I said so. I felt the truth of it, and also a terrible sense of disloyalty, as if I were abandoning my father.

I hurried to the hospital the next morning with my mother. My father was in a peculiar state: completely articulate and completely delusional. The blood in his brain was displacing gray matter, and this small compression of physical stuff—a few ounces of wrinkled tissue, hardly more substantial than cotton wadding—had spirited him away to a parallel universe.