Humanity
Facing cancer, I now understand the hidden lesson in my father's final days
By Karen McKinney The Washington Post
Published June 26, 2026
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Every other Monday, poison drips into my veins. That is not a metaphor. It is chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, and I am trying very hard not to become a statistic.
Every chemo session, I find myself wishing I could call my father. I want to tell him I am frightened, I want to ask him how he kept going when life asked more of him than seemed possible. Mostly, I want to hear his voice. He would understand something about survival.
The last time my father saw his mother, brother and sister, he was 17 and hiding in the rafters of his home in Poland. He watched as Nazis took his mother and siblings away to their death.
He never spoke about it. Not once.
Instead, he survived. He came to America, married my mother, raised a family, and built a life from nothing. He loved us fiercely. He painted portraits of his grandchildren. He earned patents into his 90s. He approached everything he did with a discipline and an excellence I've never witnessed anywhere.
Whatever grief he carried, he carried it silently. Near the end of his life, something changed.
The man who had spent decades speaking English suddenly spoke only Polish. He became agitated and confused. He repeated one word over and over.
Prdko. Prdko. Hurry. Hurry.
We wondered, terrified, whether somewhere inside his sudden failing mind he had returned to that moment when his family disappeared forever. When his life shattered.
When I got the call to come to the hospital, a nurse met me outside his room.
"Your father was crying for his mother all night," she said softly. "Everyone on the ward could hear him."
My heart cracked open. He had never spoken of her. Not once.
Yet, after 80 years, as death approached, he was calling for his mother. Was he seeing her?
My brother and I kept vigil for days. We slept in chairs beside our father's bed and waited. But like everything he did, he refused to give in or to give up. Surely this was the survival spirit I need to learn from.
At one point, we smuggled my mother out of her nursing home so she could say goodbye. Alzheimer's had stolen much of her memory, but not her instinct. She climbed into his narrow hospital bed and lay beside him, the way she had for nearly 70 years.
Love, it seemed, remembered what the mind could not.
A few nights later, after days without sleep, I drifted off in a chair beside my father's bed.
Suddenly the door flew open and the lights snapped on. A nurse walked into the room, looked at my father and shook her head.
"This is disgraceful," she said. "You cannot let a dignified man die this way."
She disappeared and returned carrying a basin of warm water, shaving cream and a razor.
I watched as she carefully shaved my unconscious father. She combed his hair. She massaged lotion into his skin. She straightened his blankets. He looked like himself again.
This woman knew my father would probably be dead within a day.
She did it anyway. Not because it would save him, not because anyone asked her to. Because a life mattered. Because even at the end of a life, kindness matters.
She was honoring another human being she didn't even know. She was sending him home with the greatest ritual and gift ever: an act of love.
My father died the following day at age 94.
When my brother and I returned to his room, there was a note on the whiteboard from the nurse.
"Ruth sends her love. ... Your dad must be proud of you. You have shown strength and love. I was blessed to meet you all."
My father often gifted special people with his artwork. A photo, a painting.
A day or two later, I left one of my father's photographs for her at the nurses' station. A month afterward, a card arrived at my home. Ruth wrote that caring for my father had made her a better person. She said that his photograph hung near her front door and that she would never forget him.
I have never forgotten her.
Now, years later, I sit in a chemotherapy chair. I think of her. I think of him. I am grateful for every nurse who asks me how I feel today, for the warm blanket they offer.
My husband drives me to every treatment session. He waits beside me. He takes notes when doctors speak because sometimes I am too exhausted or frightened to absorb what they are saying. After my surgery, he slept for six nights in a hospital chair while I was in pain.
Like my father, he shows up.
When a nurse told me that my father had spent the night crying for his mother, I was stunned. Now I understand.
When we are frightened, when we are vulnerable, when we are forced to confront our mortality, we reach for the people who taught us how to endure.
My father called for his mother.
I find myself calling for my father.
For years, I thought his lesson was endurance. Survival. The ability to keep going no matter what.
Now I think it was something else.
The darkness is real. My father knew that better than most. He knew it as a 17-year-old hidden away while his family was taken. I know it now as poison drips into my veins every other Monday.
But that is not the whole story.
A wife climbed into a hospital bed beside her dying husband one last time. A nurse named Ruth refused to let an honorable man leave this world looking anything less than dignified. A husband has never missed a chemotherapy appointment and holds his wife's hand every night in the dark.
We cannot always stop suffering. We cannot always save the people we love. We cannot always change what happens to us.
But we can accompany one another through it.
After everything he lost, he still believed in people. And somehow, even now, he is teaching me to do the same.
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Karen McKinney is a career prosecutor and former public defender who rose to the highest ranks of the gang unit in Orange County, California. She is also a screenwriter and producer who has developed a pilot script with Law & Orderproducer Robert Nathan and another with producer partner Gary Hart, former head of Paramount TV. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University, Karen lives with her husband and two children in Orange County, California, where she continues to work in the district attorney’s office.