Sitting With the Unresolved

I’m at the stage of life where many of us are watching our parents’ bodies begin to break down. If we’ve been lucky enough to avoid terminal cancer, heart attacks, or sudden tragedies at younger ages, now it’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cognitive decline, and degenerative heart conditions catching up with them. And as their kids, we’re the ones living through that slow end-of-life chapter alongside them.

And this is what I’m dealing with, with my dad. At 88, his time left is most likely to be measured in months. Like how babies and toddlers are 12 and 18 months, not one or one and a half years.

He’s in and out of the hospital, his body and chronic conditions catching up to him.

For the last few years, as he’s been declining, every time I saw him — once or twice a year — I’d say goodbye as if it were the last time. Last week, as he waved to me off the balcony while my brother and I walked away, I said goodbye with the reality that this time, it really might be.

I have so many uneasy thoughts I’m holding at once, trying to figure out what I want to do with them.

I’ll start with what is maybe the least ambiguous: this question of quality of life. It’s easy to forget how amazing it is that at 88 he’s even still here. Antibiotics, surgery, and chronic disease management have increased life span over the past hundred years — but at what cost? My dad knows that he doesn’t like medical intervention. He hates the hospital and has limits on what tests he’ll do. He knows what kind of life he wants, and unfortunately, it’s a life from 20 years ago. So where does that leave him? For now, in denial of the hard questions he faces.

After that, things feel less clear. We move from health care logistics into my own reckoning — sitting with emotions, with a brick in my chest, trying to make some kind of sense or resolve over time. My dad is unable, unwilling, or simply not wanting to face the reality of the future. Like many, he so desperately wants things to stay the same. And because of that, he can’t — or won’t — articulate his wishes for end of life. That is fully his right; maybe it’s asking too much to expect otherwise. Maybe I’ll do just the same.

But that still leaves me here, without the guidance I hoped for and maybe never will get. I have no choice but to try to read between the lines, to make as much sense as I can from the fragments I do have.

And then I wonder: how do you find peace with someone who is holding on, when you’re not even sure they want to be?

Beneath all of this though, what I keep coming back to is my relationship with my dad. How do I want to manage this final stretch with someone whose relationship with me has always been complicated? He hasn’t been close to the person I grew up with for at least the last ten years.

What does grief look like with someone whose connection to you is grounded in love, but also marked by emptiness? I don’t think my dad will ever really know who I am. With his own unresolved baggage, he was never able to allow himself to get to know and accept me. I was always a vessel for him to fulfill his life accomplishments and dreams — and when it became clear I couldn’t fill that void (because no one can), disappointment (in me? in himself?) emerged and his interest in me faded.

Certain elements have become clearer as I’ve been processing this final phase of his life. I have love and empathy for him. I can understand the choices he made. I know he did the best he could with the emotional tools he had.

As his child, though, I don’t know what to do with these feelings of unresolved grief and confusion. I keep sitting in them, convinced there must be some way to move through — but I haven’t figured it out.

So I write, because right now writing is the only way I know to get closer to my truth and calm. I don’t have answers for you all on what to do with this anticipatory grief or what to say in these last chapters.

But if you’ve been here — navigating the end of a complicated parent relationship — I’d welcome your guidance. What helped you find peace, or at least a way forward?