Watching My Parents Die Convinced Me To Plan A Completely Different Path — And My Idea Came From A Movie

“I saw Dad’s junk today. Good times!”

“You just made me spit out my coffee,” my sister texted back with a laughing-crying emoji.

The mental image of Lisa doing a spit take at work was a small consolation for seeing my dad in this diminished state. No longer able to navigate a trip to the bathroom on his own, he’d ended up on the tile floor at 3 a.m. with his pajama pants bunched around his knees. He was too weak to get himself back to bed.

Dad had entered hospice a few weeks before this episode because he was dying from a rare bone marrow cancer. He had only six weeks to live, and I’d flown across the country to be his in-home hospice caregiver. Lisa eventually joined me in Dad’s house as co-caregiver. She saw his junk, too.

Along with confirming that I would have made a lousy nurse, the experience raised a nagging question that would haunt me in the following years: With no kids of my own, who will take care of me when my time comes?

When I first arrived in Michigan to help my dad, I didn’t believe he would die in a little over a month. The man seemed fine, puttering around the house on his own and laughing with family during visits. There really wasn’t much for me to do, other than to make sure he took his meds each morning and cook something for dinner before “Jeopardy!” came on. But just as hospice predicted, Dad declined a little each week. He became fatigued and unsteady on his feet, requiring a walker and eating less and less of the food I prepared.

His pain increased to the point where morphine was no longer up to the task, and the hospice nurse — who came to Dad’s house just once a week for a quick check-in — asked me if I thought it was time for a fentanyl patch.

“I’m a magazine editor,” I thought. “How the