Dying is Inevitable. Accepting This Takes Practice.

Helping my child die was not about hanging on. It was about letting go

About seven years and a lifetime ago, I spoke to a hospice coordinator for the first time. It was a call I had managed to put off until I had a very meaningful conversation with a friend who’d lost her son to cancer.

We connected at a rehearsal for a show our girls were performing in together. Her daughter, who’d been 8 when her brother died, was in the same music program as my daughter, Ana. This woman knew about my family and I knew about hers, but we’d never spoken before that day.

Our first conversation lasted over two hours and took place behind the music building where our girls were rehearsing. I told her how sick Ana was, how her oncologist said there was nothing more he could do, and how there was no way to know how much time Ana had.

My new friend, who had been through this exact scenario six years earlier when her son was 16, advised me to reach out to hospice before Ana got any sicker. “You want to be prepared for everything,” she’d said.

And so I called hospice and started the conversation by asking a few not-so-hard questions.

“Have you worked with teenagers before?” I wanted to know.

The woman had replied, “No, but we’ve got some great nurses on staff and we’re right in your neighborhood. You won’t be alone.”

She was nice. She had pulled over on her way home from visiting someone’s dying mother or father and talked to me for an hour. I remember almost nothing about that conversation except for the constant feeling that my heart was literally going to burst. It was hard to talk about Ana’s impending death when she was still functioning, going to school, hanging out with friends.

At that point in her illness, Ana looked healthy, though her lung tumors were growing while her body — and stamina — had begun shrinking.

It’s odd how we don’t talk about dying until we’re faced with imminent death. Everybody dies. Everybody grieves. We’re inextricably connected by these inevitabilities, but we don’t talk about it. We break it away from every other part of our lives and give it its own name. Hospice — a dark, separate place.

I avoided dealing with Hospice up until the moment I had to speak with a hospice coordinator about my dying child.

She spoke candidly, unafraid to peer into the abyss with me. That’s when I realized that the palliative care team at the hospital, and the local hospice organization in my community, were guides.

Life is filled with them, Sherpas who lead us through the unknown. Parents, teachers, mentors, friends — we seek advice and, if we’re lucky, they give it.

That year, we were in a place of dying. It was a barren place, a place without clear paths. To find the way through it, I needed to be brave enough to look for those hidden paths. But I wasn’t brave. I was terrified. I don’t have to think too hard on that time in my life to recall the fear and terror I faced when I was forced to imagine the ways that Ana would die.

I didn’t know what to do with my fear. It was heavy and immovable. It was also terribly lonely trying to manage my grief and fear while pretending to be strong. It had been like trying to find a comfortable place to lie down in a room filled with hard surfaces and bright light.

My pain and heartache were fathomless, indefinable. You can’t understand it unless you’ve experienced it yourself.

Then you know how everything can hurt. Phrases like, “hang in there” and “stay strong” sounded like mockery, shrieking into the most sensitive parts of my despair. It made the pain worse, like pressing on an open wound. It would have been so much easier if I’d been the one who was dying.

Eventually I learned that helping my child die was not about hanging on. It was about letting go, reconciling, finding peace.

When I tried to deny this truth or ignore it, it made the process so much worse, so much more terrifying. I was on a train hurtling toward a broken bridge.

I was on a rollercoaster that jumped its track.

I was on an elevator whose cable had snapped.

Down, down, down — that’s where I kept going as I watched Ana’s CT scans come back with more dark shadows and the oncologist’s grim, compassionate face grow ever more somber. I’d wished desperately for good news, but it was never good. The cancer had hit its tipping point.

Wishing didn’t help. But I did it anyway. I wished we were a normal family even as Hospice delivered the supplemental oxygen, the high potency pain killers, the DNR order for me to sign.

I wished that we had been busy with life, preparing for the end of the school year, complaining about the dreary weather that last winter Ana was alive. I wished, over and over again, that it was me and not Ana who was dying.

People said we were living through hell and sometimes we said it too — my husband and I — that it was a living hell, being so close to cancer for nearly five years and not being able to stop what was coming.

But denial wasn’t the way through it.

Eventually, I forced myself to look at my own fear of death — of Ana’s death. The hardest part of this process was accepting that Ana was really going to die when I could hardly stand to think about it at all.

I told myself that, as her mother, it was my job to make her death go as smoothly and painlessly as possible. I would be strong for her because falling apart wasn’t an option.

So, I did what every writer does —lots of research. I started by reading a book called “Sacred Passage: How to Provide Fearless, Compassionate Care for the Dying” by Margaret Coberly.

A former Emergency Room nurse who realized that her training lacked guidance for terminally ill patients, she studied Tibetan Buddhism and learned a different approach to dealing with death — an approach that starts with acceptance and acknowledgement.

Ms. Coberly’s book made me realize that I was woefully unprepared to help Ana go through the process of dying in a way that was peaceful and, ultimately, healing.

My own fear of death and my incredibly strong desire not to lose my child were getting in the way. But mothering, for me, has always been about advocating for my kids. You can’t be a good advocate if you’re unprepared.

When Ana first got sick, I’d made it my mission to learn everything possible about her illness and potential treatments. I sought desperately for the cure, the magic bullet that would save her. But five years later, when it was clear she was dying, I realized that I needed to educate myself about death and dying. It was the only way I could be her Sherpa. And so that’s what I did.

I stopped recoiling from death. I read, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” and thought about my own death a lot. What would it look like? How could I prepare for it? What could I do to help the people in my life say goodbye to me?

I never completely banished the fear of death — or of losing Ana — during this time. The last few weeks of her life were awful and traumatizing and unfortunately represent my clearest memories of her.

But by educating myself about death so that I could help Ana die, I discovered an odd comfort. I learned that blindly ignoring death is reckless. It enabled me to treat time as an infinite resource. It was preventing me from being truly present for Ana. Luckily, and thankfully, I was able to get my shit together before it was too late.

Ana died at home peacefully in her own bed. She felt the sunlight on her face on that last day. My husband and I were with her up until she breathed her last breath and we sat with her for a few hours after. I told her I loved her. I told her it was okay to go.

It took me years to realize that having this moment with her, away from hospitals and heart monitors and other people’s fear, was a gift.

It’s been six years since Ana died and I’ve come a long way with grief and acceptance. But I still have a lot of work to do. It’s easy to get distracted with life and ignore the important conversations that we all need to have.

Whenever I think of losing someone else, my mind wants to shut down, close the blinds, go completely dark. But then I remember that Ana taught me how to be brave. While I’ll never have complete control of my death — or anyone else’s — accepting that death is inevitable is the best way to prepare for it.

A version of this story was originally published in HuffPost.