We Learned My Dad Was Dying — And We Chose Not To Tell Him. Did We Make The Wrong Decision?

The author's mom and dad in the garden at their home in Johannesburg during the COVID pandemic in 2020."My dad loved gardening and growing roses," she writes."This is the last photo I have of him when he was still mobile."I walk into my father’s bedroom, and there’s a different man in his bed. I reel in shock but slap a smile on my face because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

“He said it’s only a matter of time before your father goes.” My mom’s eyes widen and fill with tears. “What does that mean? Where would your father go?”I swallow hard, but my throat is concrete. We’ve been expecting this — COPD is a progressive disease, and over the last year, it’s been getting worse — but it’s still a shock.“No, we can’t tell him,” my mother says firmly. “It would make him so depressed.

I’m now worried about what harm could be caused to my father — and us — by keeping the information to ourselves. When he begins to wrap up a phone call, I quickly slip in an “I love you lots.” It’s weird because we’ve never had a relaxed, open relationship in which saying such things to each other is no big deal. But, while he doesn’t know he’s dying, I do, and it makes me want to remind him that he’s loved. When I express such emotion, he pauses, sometimes laughs uncomfortably, or says “OK!”

We’ve been on the flare-up rollercoaster a few times over the last two years and we’ve become used to it. It’s easy to forget that one of those flare-ups could lead to death. My father’s lungs are so damaged from decades of smoking that they can’t handle a mild case of the sniffles. He became even more reserved during his last weeks. I would have loved to know what he was thinking or feeling and if he had any fears about dying, but I couldn’t chat to him about any of it.

This isn’t the deathbed conversation I expected. It’s a one-way conversation in which we hope our words give him the comfort he needs to deal with the last few hours of his life and whatever happens next.

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