Farewell, Hope.

The hospital waiting room had become a second home—not in how a home provides comfort, but in how a prison cell becomes familiar to its inmate. The stiff chairs, the constant hum of fluorescent lights, and the sterile scent of antiseptic and faded hope clung to the air like ghosts that refused to leave. Day after day, we gathered there, breathing in recycled air, counting the hours until we were forced to leave, only to return the next morning. We were trapped in a loop of waiting, wanting, and fearing what would come.

Halloween has always been my favorite day of the year. It was a day of magic, of spirits, of blurred lines between the living and the dead. But this year, the ghosts were not creeping in the shadows; they were sitting beside me, whispering in my ear, wrapping their icy fingers around my spine, warning me of what was to come.

My leg trembled relentlessly, a physical manifestation of the fear I tried to suppress. I clenched my fists until my nails bit into my palms, willing myself to hold it together, to keep breathing, to pretend for just a little longer that hope was still something I could afford to have.

Then, the doctors walked in. A new team. Always a new team. Their faces blurred together, names slipping away before I could remember them. I hated them for that. How could real care exist in a place where no one stayed long enough to truly know their patients? How could they speak about my father as if he were just another case, just another statistic, just another dying man in a bed they would soon forget?

The young cancer specialist sat down, directly in the center of our fragile, fraying family circle.

"Your father has stage 4 cancer. It is untreatable. Incurable."

The words did not register at first. They floated above me, weightless and meaningless, before they came crashing down, suffocating me under their unbearable gravity. My stepmother gasped. My brother stiffened. The world around me blurred as a deafening silence filled the room, broken only by the ragged sound of my own breathing.

And then we broke. We sobbed. We screamed. We begged the universe to take it back, to rewind time, to erase the moment those words had been spoken. But time is cruel. It does not bargain. It does not take pity. It does not stop, even when your world has just ended.

The next few days became a frantic, desperate grasp for hope. The doctors dangled fragile lifelines before us. "If he can make it to chemo, he might have six months. Maybe a year." And so, we latched onto that—one year. One more year for him to see my brother marry. One more year to pretend we had time.

But hope is a liar. It taunted us, whispered promises that were never meant to be kept. And one by one, those promises were taken from us.

Every night, I lay in my own bed, awake in the dark. Still hearing the beeping of hospital machines, the muffled voices of nurses outside the room, the quiet exhalation of the ventilator keeping my father alive. Hope would creep in, unwanted, whispering possibilities in my mind—maybe tomorrow will be different, maybe a new treatment will emerge, maybe a miracle will happen. And every morning, reality struck down those illusions with a force I could barely withstand.

On November 10th, we moved him to a hospital in Boston, chasing a miracle we already knew would not come. The halls were different, the doctors were different, but the reality remained the same. We watched as they poked and prodded, testing, scanning, reviewing numbers that told us nothing we wanted to hear. Still, I clung to the idea that maybe they had missed something, that maybe this place held answers that the last one did not.

And then, on November 12th, the final blow landed.

"There’s nothing left to be done."

Hope died that day.

And with it, the future I had once believed in. The version of my life where my father walked me down the aisle. The version where he held my child in his arms. The version where I could pick up the phone and hear his voice on the other end.

They were gone. Stolen. Torn from me with a merciless finality that left no room for bargaining.

I could not let myself hope anymore. To hope meant to break again and again, to reach for something that would never come, to drown in the weight of endless disappointment. I had to destroy my hope before it destroyed me.

And so, I did.

I let it die. I let the walls around my heart rise, let the numbness settle in, let the certainty of loss become my new reality. Because if I accepted it, if I surrendered to it, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe I could survive it.

But what is survival when you have to carve out a part of yourself to endure? What is life when it is lived without hope?

I watched as my father faded before my eyes. His voice weakened. His body grew frail. The light in his eyes dimmed. And yet, somehow, he still fought. Perhaps he had not yet destroyed his hope the way I had.

I envied him for that. I envied the way he held on, the way he still squeezed my hand even when he was too weak to lift his own. I envied the way he still tried to joke, even as his words slurred and his breathing grew labored.

But I also knew better.

Hope is a beautiful thing. But it is also cruel. It keeps you hanging on when you should let go. It blinds you to the inevitable. And when it shatters, it takes pieces of you with it.

I had already shattered once. I could not afford to do it again.

So I let it die. I let it slip from my fingers like dust in the wind, like a whisper of something that once was, like a dream fading with the morning light.

I destroyed my hope so I could survive.

But am I truly living? Or am I merely existing, wandering through the wreckage of a future that will never be?