This is my tragic story about the spiritual , emotional , mental , and physical annihilation that happens when a child is forced to watch a parent die of a terminal disease. It’s the worst thing in the universe. 

On may 18th 2020 , my father suddenly wasn’t feeling well and was rushed to the hospital. Nothing genuinely bad had ever happened to me before in my life , so when doctors said they found something in my dads  pancreas I convinced myself that it was pancreatitis. The next day they diagnosed my father with pancreatic cancer. I didn’t know anything about the topic so when I went and googled the disease , the first thing I saw was ,” 5% of patients live 5 years after diagnosis.” As soon as I read that I got hit with a cataclysmic asteroid of anticipatory grief that left me horribly catatonic. The second I read the statistics, I knew he was going to die. Pancreatic cancer is the worst cancer in the world because symptoms don’t show up until stage 4 , and by than it has devoured the liver and becomes a death sentence. Almost NO ONE survives pancreatic cancer. 

The hell and fury that was unleashed on me and my family during my fathers heroically fought ordeal was so demonically insidious even the devil couldn’t conjure up something more nefarious. 

It started when I took my dad to his first chemo session with obtuse childlike naivety. The millisecond we took our first steps into the clinic we unknowingly but instantaneously became the pancreatic cancer’s slaves and he has now maniacally metastasized into becoming our master. With his grief laced chemo IV he gives us our lashings everyday for the next 14 months until he claims his ultimate permanent prize. 

It continued with me waiting for him at the chemo center while seeing the living dead walk out the front doors whilst knowing next week they’ll never walk back in. It continued with my dad getting liver cirrhosis out of no where which became the impetus for my chronic anxiety due to the beginning of the mercurial process of organ failure. It continued with his precious stomach expanding from twice , to four , to six times the average size due to the liquid back up from the ascites caused by liver failure. It continued with 4 am hellish anxiety ridden emergency room drives and fearing the guilt I’d feel if I didn’t make it two minutes earlier to the emergency room as two minutes can be the difference between life and death especially while he’s shrieking in pure agony. It continued with the tumor growing and hitting other organs near the pancreas which caused him to have non stop acid reflux causing him to SCREECH in anguish day after day as the burning acid would incinerate his throat. It continued with him vomiting green bile from the deepest pits of his stomach for hours everyday into a trash can he carried everywhere in the house. It continued with him screaming each time the tumor grew and stabbed his other organs while he’s begging for his pain medication. It continued with the chemo destroying him faster than the cancer did, since fighting poison with poison will lead to death anyways. It continued with me watching my statuesque father barely being able to take two bites of his favorite sandwich. It continued with me watching my once healthy looking father become emaciated loosing 8 pounds in one week and now being able to see his rib cage. It continued with 4 doctors each telling me every week for one month that he’s going to die any day now . It continued with hundreds of chemo , doctor , and emergency room visits as I’m watching  everyone around me in the hospital slowly transform into one colossal cemetery. It continued with watching the man who ferociously raised me for 28 years , become a skeleton and bound to a wheelchair. It continued with us being in so much denial thinking that we could take care of him at home while he’s being devoured alive by the cancer , that our ignorance almost caused him to die in my childhood room he raised me in. It continued with us taking him to the hospital for the final time, and every nurse is secretly goggle eyed as they know he has 24 hours left. It continues with sheer desperation as you make yourself believe that if he drinks this protein shake the cancer will vanish and he’ll somehow have a brand new liver.It continued with him plummeting into a state of delirium and not recognizing me, his own son that he gave birth too. It continued with him suddenly becoming comatose and I had to watch my father who was once a prolific mechanic, now fall into a vegetative state. It continued with confusion because even though I knew he was going to die , my soul would still come out of my body and I’d shake him with the most incomprehensible wail as I’m screaming , “DAD! NO!” every time his breath would skip over. It continues with me weepingly and helplessly watching my father’s health decline from 100% to 2%. It continued with me being forced to witness that final 2% dissipate as I’m watching him tumultuously die while his blood pressure becomes the clock that will inform us when it strikes death. It continues with soul splitting anticipation as I know the most catastrophic moment in my life is about to set me on a spiral of unprecedented self destruction in a few hours. It continues with me holding his battle scar ridden bleeding hands and them becoming colder as I feel his fingers slipping away. 

It ended with one feathery final breathe as I saw the man that gave me life , die right in front of my eyes as I was holding his hands the same way he held mine when I was born. 

It’s haunting me when every night I close my eyes I get flashbacks of the moment his soul left his body and I see the horror of his skeletal corpse. It’s haunting me when I realize he’ll never walk me down the aisle. It’s haunting me when I realize that my father will never meet his grandchildren. It’s haunting me knowing that one day my children will ask why they don’t have a grandfather while so many others do and I won’t know what to say. It’s haunting me knowing how much he hopelessly was doomed to suffer as his organs were actively shutting down one by one. It’s haunting me knowing that I’ve been robbed of the permission to use the letter S in parents. It’s haunting me that I’m 28 and for the next 70 years of my life I’ll never have a father again. It’s haunting me that I now have a conglomeration of demons famously known and named as PTSD, grief , anxiety , crippling depression , insomnia , and the ultimate demon known as being a fatherless son. 

I’m not dying. I’m not living. But Im dying inside. I’m ROTTING inside. Because I’ve met death , and all it took was one fatal swipe with his scythe to rob me of my childlike innocence. My father died in the worst way someone can die in only 14 short months and I had to watch every millisecond of it. How do I know my best friend wont die in a car accident in 2 hours ? How do I know my 12 year old child won’t suddenly die of a heart attack? Who wants to live in a world where at any point someone can die in the blink of an eye. I can’t handle my father’s death, even more so I know I won’t be able to handle the inevitable upcoming deaths in my life that could include the sudden death of a child. 

I fought for my father to live, but I failed since he ultimately did die, thus I am a failure. I haven’t gotten out of bed in six months because my crippling depression has reverberated millions of poisoned daggers stabbing through my entire body paralyzing the once insatiable love for life I had prior to meeting death. Pancreatic cancer destroyed my father , and now it’s hellish residual damage is actively destroying me. 

Me and my dad won every battle , but when it came to death we lost the war.