When my father died I was waiting in line at the CVS picking up a prescription in preparation for my flight in two days to visit him. He was in hospice w/ sepsis pneumonia. It was December 22, 2025, and he’d been there since Thanksgiving. Prior to hospice he was in a nursing rehab home still dying but much slower and without pneumonia.
I hadn’t had a full conversation with him in 18 months. Or maybe a little less than that when he was still talking and responsive but not lucid or barely coherent. You see, in order to tell you what happened I need to tell you what happened a year and a half before he died.
I woke up in a hotel room and took my phone off Do Not Disturb. The man I was sleeping with had just gone to shower and I checked my phone to see text after text in the family group chat about Dad in the hospital, because he’d fallen down. His wife found him on the floor, head bleeding and crying and by the time the ambulance came he was no longer conscious. I saw texts about his brain, his skull, his being taken in a helicopter to a trauma center in Baltimore.
My lover came out of the bathroom shiny with steam and wrapped in a towel, he saw my face and asked, “What happened?” and I said, “My father fell. He’s in the hospital.” He went into an immediate strategy mode, asking about how I would “go down there” and I shook my head and said no softly almost silently. “You don’t understand,” I said. Or “you don’t know my family” or something like that. This had become the norm in our family group chat for years. Dad gets sick. We react. We move. That was my response or so I’d like to believe.
But what happened next wasn’t movement: I froze. I did nothing. I replied to some texts getting clarification on some details but I did nothing else. My lover left to start his day, but I stayed in the hotel. I stayed in the bed. I did not leave the bed for the entire day. That was not my norm. That was not my usual response to my father’s varied accidents and surgeries and hospitalizations. Normally, I’d “come down there” right away. I’d rearrange my life and plans to go see him. There was always this urgent need to see and confirm the existence of my father because that’s really what was being threatened.
I texted my therapist and told her about my inability to leave the bed. She said this was normal — that it was a fear reaction — and there’s fight, flight, and then there’s freeze which I was doing. She reminded me about our sessions on threat of annihilation when our parents’ lives are threatened (or perceived as such). I would come to have this response repeatedly during my father’s descent.
And then, as quickly as I first froze, I moved. It was the exact opposite — multiple flights and arrangements for dog boarding so I could see my father even if just for a few days. Even if “seeing” him meant sitting by his bedside watching him murmur and mumble in his sleep. Eventually, I’d start to journal about all of it. Eventually, I’d come to only write about my dad, about loving him, and losing him. Eventually, I would be the first one to admit my father was not going to come back from this. That my father was not going to return to the man I knew as my father. That my father was slowly dying and there was another man in his place that I knew and yet didn’t know at all….
But I still haven’t told you what happened. I need to tell you why I was in that hotel room.
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