How I Helped My Dad Die

His body wrecked by ALS, my father insisted that his death, like his life, was his to control

- By Esmé E. Deprez

I was finishing up breakfast in New York when my dad sent me a text message. He was ready to die, and he needed me to help.

The request left me shaken, but that’s different than saying it came as a shock. I’d begun to grasp that something was really wrong 10 months before, in May 2019, when he’d come to California from Maine. He was there to meet his first granddaughter, Fern, to whom I’d recently given birth. But he couldn’t bend down to pick her up. He was having trouble walking, and he spoke of the future in uncharacteristically dark terms. We’d traveled to see him in Maine four times since then, and each time he’d looked older: his face more gaunt, his frame more frail.

At first, he’d walk the short distance to go to the bathroom. Then he needed someone to help him stand and use a portable urinal. Where once we’d all gather around the candlelit dinner table to eat, a ritual on which he’d always insisted, he now sat with a plate in front of the television. Eventually he started sleeping in a mechanical hospital bed on the first floor so he could avoid the stairs. He refused the wheelchair and walker, and kept falling as a result. I hated my growing hesitancy to place Fern in his lap, but sensed his fear of dropping her.