In my version of the story of my father’s illness and death, my father and I were the protagonists: a hero father and a daughter who loved him more than anything. My siblings—Yasmeen and Kwame—were background players. This was self-centered, and I did not care. My father’s illness, in my story, happened almost as much to me as it did to him. I watched him shrink. I smelled his stale, dying breath as I lay beside him telling him pointless stories about school, and films, and what I ate for lunch. I heard him cry out from pain or humiliation when his bowels failed and he woke up in a pool of his
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