Hospital regulations require filling in the date and time in a Do Not Intubate (DNI) form, as if to record the exact moment you let go.
On April 10, 2024, at 1:10 pm, I signed my grandfather's form. I had spent almost a decade attempting to delay the inevitable, not knowing that one day I would have to help him embrace it.
You do everything you can to save a loved one, but you can't love someone out of dying. Love should be enough, but sometimes it isn’t. Nothing prepares you for that day. I am a lawyer and a public health professional. I knew a right to life with dignity includes a right to die with it. I knew my grandfather would not want to continue living hooked up to machines; alive but only technically so.
No more ramming a tube down his throat.
No extreme measures.
My knowing was unshakable. Yet, a kind nurse had to steady my hand so I could fill out the form. Then I sat by my grandfather’s bedside, in the ICU, holding his hand. Because even though love isn't always enough, it's all we really have in life.
And in the end? Love is a trembling, warm hand holding a soon-to-be-cold one.
His laboured breathing, a ticking clock, the beeping of the cardiac monitor. Silence. It was the kind of silence that settles in your bones. My grandfather, who was once larger than life, now looked frail. In the moments following a loved one’s death, you enter a liminal space. Here, life as you knew it no longer exists, and the future is yet to arrive. Around me, doctors and nurses rushed to tend to the living. But I was in a room at the end of life.
I was the one who broke the news to my father. I knew my father would want me to be the one to break the news to him. “He’s gone. They did everything they could. He wasn't alone. I was with him,” I said. All true. Though what I really wanted to say was, “I’m sorry. He was struggling to breathe, and all I could do was hold his hand.” Also true.
But it's hard to say any of that when you have just had the wind knocked out of you, watching someone you love gasp for air. So, I didn't say it.