Nonfiction | January 13, 2026

The Language of My Father’s Dying  

Askold Melnyczuk 

“I always thought I’d die first,” said my mother as she watched my father, doped on methadone and oxycodone, whispering to the phantoms with  whom he’d lately begun to commune. 

I put my hand under his chin, pushed back his neck, and resumed shaving him. His decline after breaking his hip had been gradual, ruthless, and inexorable. Acute pain—nothing unusual, just back, hips, knee—eventually reached a point where any movement induced wincing and yelps. Yet, until he entered hospice, he refused all opioids and most analgesics. He preferred to be aware of his condition.  

I switched the shaver off and drew a warm towel over his face. 

In the process of caring for him, I grew intimate with his body in a way I never expected. In his last months, I showered him, repeatedly reapplied his catheter, and helped him with all the procedures of the commode: ministrations not unlike what’s required of a parent caring for an infant. The initial shock of such close physical engagement subsided quickly. Over the years, I’d grown similarly familiar with my mother’s body. As I explained to friends—that is, on those rare occasions when we actually crossed paths as, over the last years, I’d more or less stopped attending any but the most unavoidable social functions—my charges were like three-year-olds who happened to be chronically and terminally ill. At the same time, I kept in mind something Thomas Lynch, the undertaker-cum-poet-memoirist, once said: you haven’t lived until you’ve embalmed your own father. That was a privilege I was happy to forego.