by Nausheen Eusuf

I recently had the wrenching experience of seeing a friend lose her mother to cancer. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it had already metastasized. Treatment would be palliative, not curative, the oncologist explained. One-and-a-half to two years was the prognosis.

This summer, she died at the one-and-a-half year mark. What was horrifying wasn’t the death itself—which was a welcome release—but the suffering that preceded it. The unrelenting pain, the flesh coming loose from the bone, the breath rattling to be free of its bone-house prison. And for everyone else around her, the utter helplessness of keeping a vigil unto death.

For me, it brought back my own mother’s slow demise some fourteen years ago. It was kidney failure, not cancer, but the distinction is irrelevant. The last three years were awful; the last six months wretched.

But there’s something more harrowing still—worse than either the suffering or the loss. It’s your own reactions to such suffering—your own failure of empathy—that may surprise you and haunt you for years to come.

We’d like to think that we’re good human beings—loving, kind, empathic. If a loved one is in pain, we like to think we would be by their side, taking care of them, providing support and comfort and solace. At least that’s how I had imagined it would be. After all, I was close to my parents, especially my mother, who was the most important person in my life. Her wit and vivacity made her sparkle, a welcome counterpoise to the dignified seriousness of my father. Even strangers would be disarmed by her droll irreverence, and endeared by her warmth and candor. I liked to think that as her child, I was heir to the qualities that made her singular and peerless. I adored and admired her in equal measure.

But when the time came, when she needed me the most, I faltered. When the love I had assumed so easily was tested, I failed. As her body withered and her mind crumbled, as she was most vulnerable and most in need, I wanted to have as little to do with her as possible.

How could I love this person who didn’t look like my mother, didn’t sound like her, didn’t smell like her—and simply wasn’t her? Her skin had grown a yellowish gray and smelled faintly of urine. A stroke left her cognitively impaired, so despite having been a professor she was now completely muddled, like someone with dementia. She lost control of her bodily functions. Her body was giving up, its systems failing, her human dignity being slowly peeled away. The betrayal of the body: how frail our earthly trust.

What could be more vulnerable? She asked me to spend time with her. More than once. But I couldn’t. I’m ashamed to say I felt repulsed by what she had become. I couldn’t accept or recognize her anymore. Which is to say, I could no longer recognize the humanity of the woman who had given me life, raised me, adored me. I couldn’t empathize with her vulnerability, her suffering, her need. Did she feel the horror of her own decline? Did she feel terror in those last weeks, not knowing what lies after? She must have; I certainly would. But I couldn’t bear to be with her. I stayed away. It was selfish and cruel. If anything, I wanted death to come quickly and the ordeal to be over.

Dying must be the loneliest time of one’s life—at least when it’s long drawn out. Being felled quickly is much kinder, gentler on both body and soul. Dying is ugly, and it exposes the ugliness within us as well. It’s dehumanizing—it made her seem less than human. And it blighted my own humanity, my own capacity to love. The betrayal of the body is one thing; but what about the betrayal of your own flesh?

Paradoxically, how you deal with the dying is a test for the living—a test of your principles, your character, your humanity. Surviving the death of a terminally ill parent is about more than just surviving the loss itself. It’s about surviving what it does to you. The legacy of loss is a harrowing of the soul, which must make peace with its own frailty.

And perhaps in the process of accepting and forgiving our own fallibility, we reclaim a little of our humanity, our capacity to love. Perhaps it’s only then that we actually earn it.

Nausheen Eusuf explores issues of grief and trauma in her recent first collection of poems, Not Elegy, But Eros. Her poetry has appeared in The American Scholar, The Guardian, Poetry Daily, and World Literature Today, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2018. You can find more of her work at www.nausheeneusuf.com.