The last week of his life, I finally told him I was afraid I had stolen eleven months from him. He looked at me and said, “You didn’t steal them.” Then he asked whether my daughter remembered the summer he taught her how to fish, and I said she did. He smiled and said, “Then you gave me something I didn’t know I was going to want.” I started crying because I had spent years wondering whether loving him meant knowing when to let him go. He reached for my hand and said, “You weren’t supposed to make that decision for me.”
I asked him whether he would have chosen treatment if he had known how much those eleven months would hurt. He thought about it for a long time before answering. Then he said, “If I knew she would remember me, I would have asked you for another year.” I told him my daughter was only seven when he started treatment, and that she still talked about him as though he had been part of every important year of her life. He nodded and said, “Then I got what I wanted, even if I didn’t know I wanted it.” I asked whether he was angry that I had refused his request twice, and he shook his head.
He said, “You were my son before you were my doctor, and I knew you’d choose what you could live with.” Those were the last words he ever said to me about it. I never told my brother that Dad had asked me to stop treatment, because I don’t think that secret belongs to him. But I sometimes wonder what my father would have said if he had known my daughter would carry his memory for the rest of her life. She is seventeen now, and last week she asked why I always get quiet when someone mentions him. I told her that sometimes the hardest choices are the ones where there is no right answer. She looked at me and said, “Maybe Grandpa knew that too.”
