I began writing this on April 2nd, 2026. It's now May 10th, and I am trying to return to it because I think the numbness is wearing off and I am not doing so well with it.
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It frequently feels like I am the only one in my family who has contemplated death enough to internalize that it is coming for each and every one of us, and that nobody gets a last-minute save and a redemption storyarc.
Last Wednesday, he thought he would go home in a few days. Just a few days, they'd figure out how to get him to keep down solid foods, and he'd go home, and they'd figure out the rest of the cure from there.
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We got home from our Australia trip on Wednesday, and somewhere around San Bruno, I got a text from my little brother. Dad had been in the hospital since before we left, but now it was looking really bad. Delirious with jetlag, we got home, dropped our bags, showered, ate a snack, and drove to Pleasanton to see him at Stanford Hospital, catching the beginnings of rush hour that stretched the trip to a painful hour and a half.
He was awake, alert, and cheerful. Apparently he'd had a partial lung collapse, but they'd been able to re-inflate it, and his oxygen was back to normal. His skin was only a tiny bit waxen, but his color was otherwise good. But he still couldn't keep down food. But he was sure they'd figure that part out. Mom sat outside dictating notes into her phone while he and I chatted a little. I held his hand. At some point I realized he was getting quieter, and we were probably tiring him out, and also we were starting to get to the point where we wouldn't be safe to drive home. He seemed better than we expected, and he was confident that he was on the mend, so we made to leave.
But we stopped in the waiting room to talk to my brother, and got the real news. He had a partial bowel blockage just short of his stomach. They thought it was cancer, but it might not be. They were thinking of doing an endoscopy to see if they could see it. His chemo had been inflaming his stomach, too, so they'd stopped it. He had lost 70 pounds. They were still draining ascites. They could set him up with a bed at home so he could be more comfortable, if he could keep food down.
Later I was to find out that the chemo had stopped affecting his cancer counts, but I think by the time we left the hospital, even in fatigue delirium, I already knew he was not going home.
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It is so hard to let the soft animal that is my body feel the grief it does not want to feel. I'm looking at pictures to try to get myself to cry, to care, because this numbness doesn't feel right. But I've also had the five years since he betrayed my trust to grieve. Five years to recognize the irrelevance.
My father was not a brave man. One of my strongest memories of him was him sitting on the edge of his bed, weeping with fear, the first time he had to test his blood sugar with the little lancet. It took him two weeks to get the courage up to actually take the blood. My mother validated his fears, enabled his avoidance. In return he enabled her narcissistic and sometimes quite frankly delusional behavior. In the weeks after the cancer rediscovery, they flew to San Diego to talk to a clinic that would treat him without chemotherapy. I don't know how that conversation went, but they didn't do it, probably because my little brother objected, or possibly because of the cost, and possibly because such places, leery of lawsuits in the case of failure, insist that you still get chemo.
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I stopped writing much when I started a new job in 2009, and I never really got back to it. Then the ever-present threat of stalking and doxxing and general unwanted contact from people who think they know me better than they do and deserve my attention. So I have little way to recollect the actual timelines here without having to navigate a partial Facebook dump, along with text messages, various departed internet messenger services, several generations of Google Messenger/Hangouts, the social Slack workspaces we had, plus now Discord. But here is a rough timeline.
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In 2015 I retuned to California after six months living in London with my then-partner.
In December of 2015, still feeling calm and collected and in control of my destiny, I dressed up and went to my parents' place for the annual Christmas festivities. When I got there, my sister was having an episode. We piled into the car drove around in the thin winter light, trying to find something that was open and which my sister felt she coult eat. I took a selfie of us three in the back seat. I look back on that now as a sort of waterline - the last normal photo. As we were exiting the car at a Panda Express my mother was grilling me about healthcare. I was in a weird spot where I had been paying for travelers coverage that didn't unfortunately actually cover anything, but I had figured it all out and I was starting a new job shortly anyway. Not wanting to continue the invasive grilling, I said something short like "I've got it covered, I don't want to talk about this anymore."
And that was the thing that set my sister off.
She started ranting, and as we got back into the car to go home, it picked up in intensity until it was a full on yell. I don't even remember much of it, except the part that "Laura is poisoning this family's karma" and "we'd be better off if we killed her" and "this horrible slut beast is ruining it for us all". My mother, in an attempt to placate and stop the tirade, started agreeing with her. I mean I hope it was that, but it sure didn't feel like it. After so many years of constant suspicion, overbearing surveillance, patently self-interested control, and the combination of incredibly high standards of behavior while constantly thinking the worst of me... I'm not sure it really was.
At some point I went outside because I could not keep it together anymore. I stood there in the corner of the yard, in my festive dress and my heels stabbing into the mud, crying into the privet bush we all hated, wondering what the hell I was going to do. Dad noticed and came out to hug me, but it felt... weird. I pulled myself together enough to eat dinner and dispense presents and then made a very brittle excuse and left. I got as far as the 580 south onramp before I started sobbing; at 10:30 on Christmas Day there's nobody to hear you anyway and no traffic to worry about.
In January I was so busy I didn't have much time to think about it. But in February 2016 I started a new job, and midway through a phone call about having some sort of celebratory dinner I simply couldn't take it anymore. I told her I didn't want to see her or speak to her. I meant it. I do not recall how I managed to end that call, but I did, crying again alone in my apartment, because I'd also been fighting with M and I was quite quite exhausted. So she texted me. I had to tell her to stop.
I opened up my email the next day to see three emails from her, so I had to clarify again - that also means no forwarding jokes, no sending me pictures of yourself, nothing. Leave me alone. If you need to tell me something, do it through dad. (She's spent the last several years stalking me on LinkedIn when she's upset. It's how I know some sort of unwanted family contact is coming.)
It took months for her to settle on that, and it complicated the things then-partner and I were fighting about. I got a disastrous tax bill from a professional who made a nearly $30k "oopsie", and somehow that was my fault. My rent kept going up, this was also clearly a personal failing. My propensity for working at startups was a sign I was shifty and unreliable. He wanted children, I didn't want to have a child I might have to raise alone, and he simultaneously said both that of course he'd help but also that I was on my own and had to pull my own weight and pay my share. Work was taking too much of my time away from him; the place I'd gotten a job was stressful and toxic and somehow that was also my fault.
I had a brief but intense secondary relationship that barely lasted two months, and it was like a breath of fresh air. But when it ended, in a way that I'm still not sure I fully understand, it was back to being told that I needed to repair my relationship with my mother if I wanted to be a good mother. Now my setting of boundaries was casting suspicion on my suitability. (NB: A short time later I met the man I've now been with for nearly ten years - it was a dark time but not without its blessings.)
I found a new job in December 2016. I resigned at the awful place. We went to couples counseling. We went on a long road trip in the January between my jobs. Things felt like they were if not getting clearer, at least they were moving. I kept talking to dad throughout this.
In May of 2017... well, you might remember.
The next few years are a blur. The grief, the stress, the financial strain, and the weight of completely remaking my life from scratch. And of having to deal with the effects of doctors ignoring me, and then the spinal issues... well, it's all pretty much here. The intestines. I changed jobs again, I moved to the City. A shoulder spasm. The Pandemic. In the midst of all this, the back stairs of my apartment in the Sunset began to fall off, the landlord didn't want to deal with it, so I had to get DBI involved. That was not great, and the landlord harassment started to tick up, so... we started looking at houses. Segment got bought by Twilio. [redacted] finally went public, and suddenly I had enough of a windfall to make a downpayment. And then I had another shoulder spasm, on the other side this time, and wound up in the hospital and with a plate in my neck, anyway. In 2021 we started looking again, and in May we bought.
A few months later, dad came over to see the new place and drop off some boxes of my things. Like a proud idiot I showed him around, and we offered to make him coffee. Which was when he let slip that my mother had been in the car the whole time, gleefully soaking up my environment. There's no way he could've legitimately thought that I would've been fine with it. It was such a blow. I sort of gasped out something like "You know you can't come here anymore after this" and then went and sobbed on the back steps while M took the boxes and saw him out.
I spent the next year realizing how much of the utter shit I'd gone through was enabled by him, how he stood by silently or reinforced and supported my mother's behavior, and never tried to stop any of the shitty things that happened. I made it clear he was not to contact me again unless there was a family emergency. I saw him in a new light, as both the father I wanted to love me, and whose attention I treasured, but also as the avoidant-depressive enabler of so much of the awfulness and grief. And I must be honest with myself: being treated like a son, and then relegated to being a daughter, then back to son-ish when it was clear his actually male offspring wasn't actually interested in the same things, probably has a lot to do with who I am and am not these days.
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The rest of this I had to pick apart from the "allowed" family emergency text messages.
In Jan 2022 his appendix burst. When they removed the bits, they found a lump of cancer "the size of an almond".
In April 2022, he declined chemo, having found some doctor who told him that they could do a scan instead, and hurrah the scan was clear.
In August of 2022 he had a heart attack, and another in July 2023.
In November of 2024, they found cancer in his pelvic floor. They spent months investigating alternative therapies to avoid chemo, but by
March 2025, his abdomen was swollen with major ascites, the cancer had progressed to "inoperable", and he started chemo. I wrote him a birthday card that year to say that I didn't hate him and I was glad he was getting care and hoped he felt better soon. I heard through the not-terrible part of the family that the chemo was working, and he was doing so much better.
But then in March 2026, an intestinal blockage, pneumonia from being on a ventilator, lung collapse, ascites, and all the rest.
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My brother called me on the morning of April 1st, to tell me he thought it would be that day, and I broke and cried. Because I couldn't imagine what it would do to me if I walked into that room and triggered my sister and any part of the last day of his life was spent listening to her screaming. I told him it would be irresponsible of me to go. But I also somewhat reasonably, I think, didn't want to go. I didn't want to be there when his breath stopped for good. I wanted to remember only the good parts, the parts before the realization, the parts where I still thought he was a good man.
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As a historian I think I'm taking an abnormally and offputtingly bleak view of all of this. Everyone else expects to be the hero of their own story, to have a clear and resolved story arc. I just see the billions of untold, unrecorded, unremembered lives that have vanished across the length and breadth of human history, and my relatives' fear and panic feels... small? misplaced...? We are all going to die, sooner or later (Peter Theil be damned), and it's really only a matter of how we go, how prepared we are or are not for it, and the legacy that lives on after us.
Two things I think about, are the stories of Flo and Flint, two of Jane Goodall's famous band. When the mother died, they expected the son to rally and finally become the adult he was meant to be - and instead he shocked them by declining and dying.
And the other is a quote from Laura Ingalls Wilder, for who I am named, on the passing of her mother:
"'Mother passed away this morning' was the message that came over the wires. [...] Some of us have received such messages. Those who have not, one day will."
It's coming for us all.
Everyone is so busy chasing their immediate goals and concerns, it feels like I'm sitting on a ladder over a roiling crowd, looking out at an oncoming disaster that I know none of us can avoid. And I am just so sad and tired of this waiting. I feel like I've been waiting for it since my 15th birthday, when a classmate died and we passed his ambulance on the way to school. I feel like I've spent so much of my life on time that belongs to someone else, wondering when I get to be myself. When do I get to enjoy my life, what's left of my body? Do I ever get to do that? Dad was working until the week he died; not from necessity but from a lack of other things to do.
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And now I have to decide what is the right thing: to go to the funeral, or not? The judgement of the rest of my family hangs over me, a catch 22 and a sword of Damocles at the same time. The meta-feelings I'm having about having so few feelings is really... hard.
And now it's Mother's Day, a holiday that has filled me with a dejected exhaustion for a decade, and instead I am filled with grief and anger and hurt hurt hurt. He did this to himself, but she stood by and helped. I see his contact card still in my phone's favorites and I can't quite do anything about it. I was handed a coupon code for candy for father's day, and did a numb little half-start because I realized for the first time I couldn't give him candy even if I wanted to, and if he hadn't been painfully diabetic.
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