I used to see my dad once a fortnight. A meal, a catch up, the normal rhythm of an adult son and his father who both had busy lives and assumed there would always be more time.
Then he was diagnosed with cancer, and the rhythm changed completely.
It happened slowly at first. A hospital appointment here, a new medication there. He seemed the same dad, just with more admin attached to being him. I don't think either of us understood, in those early weeks, what the next year and a half would actually ask of us.
It took eighteen months from diagnosis to the end. Anyone who has sat inside that kind of timeline knows it isn't one long slope downward. It's not a story with a clean shape. It's weeks that feel almost normal, followed by a phone call that changes everything, followed by more weeks that feel almost normal again, until they don't.
When once a fortnight became every day
At some point - and I couldn't tell you the exact date it happened, because it didn't happen on one day, it happened gradually and then all at once - seeing my dad stopped being something I scheduled and became something I simply did. Every day. Sometimes more than once.
He became very low. And alongside that, he became obsessed with his medication - the timing of it, the doses, whether he'd taken the right thing at the right hour. I understand now that this is common. When your body stops being something you can trust, the tablets become the one part of the process you might still be able to control. At the time, I just knew that my dad needed someone to help him hold onto that control, and that someone was going to be me.
I was still working full time through all of this. There was no version of events where I could put my job down and become a full-time carer, much as some part of me wanted to. So I did both. I went to work, and I went to my dad's.
Some nights that meant going to his house at 3am. Not because anything dramatic was happening - often it was just him needing to know he wasn't managing the medication alone, or needing someone there while he worked through a bad night. I'd get the call, or sense from how the evening had gone that I should go anyway, and I'd go over in the dark and sit with him until things settled.
I don't say this looking for sympathy. I say it because I think a lot of people reading this are doing something similar right now, and nobody ever quite prepares you for what "supporting someone with cancer" actually looks like day to day. It isn't just hospital visits and difficult conversations. It's 3am. It's checking a pill organiser for the third time because he needs you to. It's turning up to work on three hours' sleep and being fine, because you have to be, because there's no one else who can be fine on your behalf.
What nobody tells you about the build-up
I think if you haven't lived through it, you imagine that the hardest part is the end - the final days, the goodbye. And that is hard, unbearably so. But the eighteen months before it are their own kind of hard, in a way that's harder to talk about because it doesn't look like grief from the outside. It looks like just getting on with things.
You go from being a son to being something closer to a carer, a scheduler, all while trying to still show up as yourself everywhere else in your life. Nobody hands you a role description. You just become whatever the day needs you to be, and you keep becoming that, again and again, for a year and a half, until it's the only shape you know how to be in anymore.
I share this because when someone you love is dying slowly rather than suddenly, there's a strange kind of guilt that comes with the ordinariness of some of the time in between. You laugh with them. You have a normal Tuesday. And then you remember why you're really there, and the ground shifts again.
If you're in the middle of that right now - the phone calls, the medication checks, the 3am drives, the trying to hold down a job and a life at the same time - I want you to know that what you're doing is real, even on the days it doesn't feel dramatic enough to count as anything. It counts. All of it counts.
Why I'm telling this story here
The Bridge of Lights exists because of moments like these - the ones that happen long before a funeral, in the ordinary hours nobody photographs. Grief doesn't start the day someone dies. For a lot of us, it starts somewhere in the eighteen months before, in the fortnightly meals that quietly became daily visits, in the medication routines, in the commute at 3am.
This is part of my own story. I'll keep telling more of it here, because I think it helps to know someone else has sat where you're sitting.