There is a moment, if you are willing to stay, when death becomes very simple. Not easy, but clear.

My father was infirm toward the end. In the weeks leading up to his passing, his partner Elizabeth and I shared time with him quietly and steadily. We were not trying to change anything. We were simply there.

I had already lost my father once as a little girl. And yet, in the years before his physical departure, after the birth of my son, we found each other again. We spoke, we shared stories, and we laughed. He had a very dry, droll sense of humour, so like my own. In those years, something settled between us. A peace neither of us had ever known.

I understood, as an adult, what I could not have understood as a child. That he had done what he believed was right. That letting go had not been abandonment, but an act shaped by circumstance, limitation, and the love available to him at the time. As a sole parent myself, I know the weight of those decisions. The quiet cost of them. And they were different times.

One of the days before he passed, I lay beside him in the hospital bed and spoke quietly, telling him how much he meant to me and that I loved him. He removed his oxygen mask and, with a strength that did not match the state of his body, pulled me close and said, “Not nearly as much as I love you.”

We stayed with him through that night. There was no urgency and no fear. Just presence. At some point, we told him it was alright to go.

In the morning, we left briefly to shower and change, intending to return. The call came not long after. He had passed.

It felt right, as though he had waited, as though he had chosen his moment. There was no sense of something taken, no rupture, only a quiet knowing.

I had lost my father once, and then, in time, I had been given the chance to know him. To be loved by him. To love him as an adult, without distance or confusion.

When it was time for him to go, nothing needed to be said beyond what had already been spoken.

It had been lived. It had been mended. And it was enough.

— Saint Parousia