false

If she tried, she could remember frantic afternoons, pressing his hurting legs, and suppressing her own hurt, as he spoke of his imminent death. I do not wish to be nasal fed, he’d declared. And she’d thought of the ugliness, the futility of it, and fervently agreed.

And yet when she’d found herself by him in the hospital, the dietitian strongly recommending nasal feeding, she had tried to be something she wasn’t -- cheerful and giving him assurances she herself didn’t believe in, and playfully admonishing to agree. Everybody had decided to extend his life that way, and she had readily cast aside her own convictions to do what was asked of her. All because she was jealous of the dietitian’s easy confidence and good humour that could coax smiles off her father.

(She had been so quick to hurt, when he’d stopped letting her kiss his cheek, cuz it suffocated him to have anyone so near to his face.)

Everybody called her strong. They told her that they wouldn't have been half as strong as her, had they been in her place. But she hadn't been strong enough to support him, when he’d recoiled from the thought of having a pipe shoved down his nose and hadn't the strength to really protest.

She was supposed to do what she needed to do. And what her father had needed was not for her to join in those thoughtless entreaties for him to accept it for his own good. Her mother hadn't understood, but she had -- that fervent desire to be dead, rather than suffer through painful days holding off death. And it was unpardonable, that she had not stood up for what had been one of his last wishes, that she hadn't stood up for what she had believed in.