Saying goodbye to a loved one from a ringside seat

The useful part

The Spinoff) The journey of a care-griever, balancing end-of-life care and grief. Because there's no reason in watching life at its cruellest, as an insidious disease strips away all of the parts of someone you love, piece by piece. Caring for someone you love as they leave this world is both the hardest thing imaginable and a privilege.

How it works

• Of sleeplessness and anxiousness, and watching for the sign of a chest still rising and falling in the dead of night.
• But, even with her legs no longer working, she didn't want to leave her own home.
• I somehow kept it together while I typed her loving words but when I left her and got into my car I wept uncontrollably.
• I will never forget just how hard she fought to stay with her sons, who she loved more than anything.
• The experiences of caring for my two loved ones as they exited this world are ones that I'll never forget, or regret, despite how unbelievably difficult it was at times.

What to take from it

Because she was family, but also because I now had the unenviable experience of caring for someone who is dying. I phoned her cousin and said "It's time for her to come to yours." This was the plan, when she could no longer cope by herself she would go and stay with her cousin, who was like a sister to her, and who had a beautiful home with a downstairs one-level apartment for my sister-in-law to occupy. It is a rollercoaster of seeing, doing and saying things you never thought you would have to.

Example or evidence

• It was a battle that would have seen less resilient and determined people give up long before.
• He was in and out of hospice several times in the final months of his life but, despite the incredible doctors and nurses who cared for him there, he didn't want to die there.
• My mother, stepbrother and I sat with his hospice care team, while my stepfather lay in the bed beside us, tears streaming down his face, by this point unable to speak.
• "We want to take him home," I told them, having become the spokesperson for our family.

Details worth keeping

I've never considered myself to be a natural nurse. It took a strength I hadn't known I possessed. "This is the loveliest man in the world who never asks for anything, ever, and this is what he wants." His care team were understandably reticent, unsure if we would be able to provide the level of care he needed.

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