The sentence that stayed with me throughout Deborah’s final hours—“I brought my daughter into the world, and I took her out of it”—felt like both a truth and a burden, something no parent ever imagines themselves saying. Sitting beside her bed, my hand wrapped around hers, time seemed to soften around us, stretching into something muted and strange. There is no guidance for how to accompany your child toward the end of her life, no script for how to breathe beside someone whose breaths grow slower, quieter, more final.

Parents aren’t meant to outlive their children. They aren’t meant to watch their bodies diminish inside hospital sheets or whisper reassurances they prayed they would never need to say. When she was born, I had held her with a strength I didn’t know I possessed; on this last day, I held her with that same strength, but now it was holding her toward peace rather than into life. Her hand felt smaller than I remembered—those hands that tied shoelaces, typed thousands of words of encouragement, clutched her children tightly, and fought for every inch of survival.