I had watched people die for eighteen years. Then the dying person was my father.
Curator’s Note: The author, Carrie Cuthbert, reflects on the profound experience of witnessing death, particularly the passing of their father, who suffered from dementia. As a paramedic, they maintained a professional distance while caring for patients, but the death of their own father shattered that boundary. Throughout the father’s illness, he became emotionally softer, expressing love in ways previously uncharacteristic. On his last day, the author oscillates between being a daughter and a caregiver, ultimately feeling guilt over not being present for his final moments. However, they later find solace in the idea that he may have waited for them to leave. Writing about this experience helped the author process grief and vulnerability, merging their professional and personal identities. Image is courtesy of the author.
Memoirs of a Paramedic
As a paramedic, I had learned how to stand beside death without letting it take me with it. There was always a boundary between the professional and the personal. The patient was someone else’s father, someone else’s husband, someone else’s whole world. That distance wasn’t indifference. It was protection.
With my dad, there was no distance.
In some ways, I had already been losing him for a while. Dementia had begun taking pieces of the man I knew—the strong body, the sharp mind, the backbone of our family. But strangely, somewhere inside that loss, I was also given a version of my father I had never really known.
My dad had always been stoic. I had never heard him cry. He rarely said, “I love you.” As his mind changed, he became softer. More emotional. He said the words easily.
Dementia was taking my father away from me, and at the same time, for a little while, it gave me another version of him.
On his last day, I spent five hours sitting with him.
At the time, I didn’t know they would be our last five hours together.
Later, I would replay them relentlessly.
What had I missed?
What should I have said?
Did he know how much I loved him?
And because I didn’t know how to simply sit there and be his daughter, part of me became a paramedic.
I listened to his breathing. I checked his pulse. I assessed him.
Those were things I understood. Things I could measure. When everything else about losing my father felt completely beyond my control, medicine gave me something solid to hold onto.
There was another feeling there too, one that was harder to admit: relief.
I loved my father desperately, but I also knew he was suffering. Part of me wanted that suffering to end.
His suffering would be over. Mine was about to begin.
Before I left that night, I assessed him one more time.
Eighteen years of experience told me he would make it through the night.
So I went home.
He died while I was gone.
For a long time, I carried guilt about that. I had been present for the deaths of strangers, yet I had somehow missed my own father’s final breath.
Eventually, though, I began to see the moment differently.
Maybe he waited until I left.
Maybe the man who had spent his life protecting me found one final way to do it.
Even at the end, he was still my father.
When I wrote Last Night I Watched My Father Die, I thought I was writing about grief.
Looking back now, I can see that I was also beginning to discover what I wanted my writing to be.
I had spent eighteen years being invited into some of the most vulnerable moments of other people’s lives.
Suddenly, I was the vulnerable one.
Writing gave me somewhere to put it.
And that story became one of the first places where the paramedic and the woman behind the uniform finally began speaking on the same page.
Read the original story, Last Night I Watched My Father Die, on Substack:
Last Night I Watched My Father Die
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