To be the single person present for another human being’s long goodbye to her own life — to hold the hand of someone as she loses, one by one, the small freedoms that made her herself — is a weight of a different kind than the bathing and the medicine.

It is a sacred weight, I think, though it did not always feel sacred at three in the morning.

But it was mine.

I was the one who was there.

And whatever else the other children took from me later, they could never take that, because you cannot inherit the nights you did not sit through.

There is a loneliness in it that I have never heard anyone name out loud, and it is this: the caregiver disappears.

Slowly, without anyone deciding it, you stop being a person with a life of your own and become a function, a service, a pair of hands attached to someone else’s needs.