When he learned the picture belonged to a stranger, he threw it away, then spent the night wishing he could throw away his feelings just as easily.

The next morning, they discovered the letters and realized that the person who had always asked if everyone else was okay had been silently begging someone to ask him the same.

He took comfort knowing that some conditions—mostly cerebral, like Multiple Systems Atrophy, Alzheimer’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the list went on—were untraceable until death.

I was one week sober last month, a relapse was in the cards, and now I’m dead so I suppose quitting won’t be so hard.

Somehow that spark became everything I’d ever wanted, only for me to lose it when I thought it was finally mine to keep.

Seeing him now in the morgue makes me wish we'd just gifted him a piece of junk like they did in the old days

My life was spared at the cost of theirs, and everything that I was as a human being.

But humans can't hear ghosts.

You said you accepted and loved me anyways, but in the end you left me too.

I wanted them to keep going.

Today, I found an unopened tube of her favourite lipstick inside the mirror cabinet of my uncle’s estate.

I walked away from his gravestone back to the car

I decided to name this place the Sepulchre of Supposes: a place where I bury the conditional: if, perhaps, had I, had you, had we.

"Keep crying, the people on the live are eating it up" The mother explains, looking at her daughter through the camera lens, yet somehow not seeing her at all.

Now dementia has made my fear come true in a room full of family and friends.

I need to see proof and I need more than a promise.

After losing my mother to adenocarcinoma just a year later, the clinic proudly announced their new and improved cancer panel, now testing for five hundred six markers.

The father and mother keep the door closed, “I’m sorry, god forgive me girls, but your mother and I can have more children, but we can’t revive ourselves.”

And neither of you know when that day is.

But the phone he could not charge was the hardest, as it contained the photos of his wife and children who no longer lived.

I stared up at the bathroom lights, sputtering bile and white foam, and panicked, soundless ‘I love you’s, over and over again.

i still weep thinking about that question at night.

What she got was her grandmother, singing softly to her granddaughter as she passed on, crying out for a mother that never wanted or loved her.

How do I convince this man who "doesn't see the point if he's dying anyway"?

It's true, though, because I don't deserve to have anybody in my life.