My Father Narrowly Escaped The Nazis. Here's What I Learned While Helping Him Die.

This man is a survivor, I kept telling myself, despite all evidence to the contrary. His face was gaunt, cheeks pale, hair threadbare from the most recent rounds of chemo. They had removed the lower left half of his jaw, searching for remnants of the disease, and his mouth hung slack and uneven. Even so, he kept trying to smile, to lighten the mood. His brown eyes danced when no other part of him could.

A gurgling came from his tracheotomy — a gaping hole in his gray-stubbled throat — so I cleared it, dipping a suction tube into the chasm of his neck, watching the phlegm rise up and into the machine. It was satisfying, hearing the tone change as the tube hit pay dirt and sucked the mucus from his body. It felt like I was helping.

His feeding machine whirred and hissed, pumping liquid nutrients into another tube in his stomach. Another breach in his body. The open wound that had blossomed on his neck was now quarter-size and white with discharge, somehow smelling both sour and sticky-sweet. I dabbed at it with gauze, sapping away the pus.

A survivor, I told myself again and again and again.

***

Only a few months before that, my father told me he had cancer, which was discovered during an innocuous visit to the dentist.

“I’m sure it will be no big deal,” he said, believing that what they found in his jaw could be dealt with, like so much else.

Within weeks he was in the hospital, hooked up to tubes, a hole punctured in his throat, six of his teeth and a quarter of jawbone pulled from his skull. It was one of the fastest-moving head and neck cancers that his doctors had ever seen.

I remember pulling up to the hospital, expecting to find him in recovery. Instead, I saw my two brothers and my mom crying outside.

“There was a