My grandfather died last week. I’ve written about him a few times here. He was my mother’s father.

I don’t quite know how to feel and that makes me feel guilty. When I was a child, we were pretty close. I stayed at his house in the Philippines every summer when I was younger. He made a permanent move to Canada in the 90s to join his children who had started their own families here. He and my grandmother were married the entire time, but when I was old enough to understand the gossip around me, I realized that he had cheated on my grandmother many decades ago and that I had a half-uncle whom I never knew about and have still never met. Still, the family stayed together, though my grandmother was noticeably resentful.

After my grandfather had his first stroke, he could still talk and walk, but both were slow and required a lot of concentration on his part. Following his second stroke many years later, he could only really mumble and, when he did, he no longer attempted English with his grandchildren and fell back on his native Filipino and Chinese, understandably. Through it all, my grandmother helped, but it was obvious she found it a burden. As a result, my grandfather seemed to get passed from sibling to sibling, under a sense of filial piety that sparked much strife and often long periods of the silence between brothers and sisters. They argued about time and money, how there wasn’t enough of either to go around, even among eight children. My grandfather became the source of bitterness and hostility, everyone feeling guilt that they wished to pass along to the other.

Even as a bystander annoyed by my mother’s family feuds, I could sometimes understand the inconvenience of the situation. In the last several years, my grandfather could no longer walk on his own, could no longer feed himself, could no longer go to the bathroom on his own. I had seen my mother helping my grandfather out of his plastic diapers once and it struck a chord in me that I still cannot describe. Finding an assisted-living home was not an alternative—not only because my grandfather would have probably attempted suicide if he were placed in one, but also because his children would never conceive of putting their father in one. As much as they quarreled over who would take him next, they would feel tremendous shame if they passed the buck to a complete stranger.

My grandfather lived with my family for several months in the last few years. Often, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to the sound of his deep, dry coughing. His coughs sounded strained and heavy, sad and despondent. It would take me a while to go back to sleep and I would think about him in his room also awake, blinking his eyes and seeing only darkness. It made my heart hurt and I tried to put it out of my mind. My mother told me he was afraid at night, that he saw shadows in the room and he thought someone was there with him. She tried to explain to him that his cataracts were causing him to see things, but he was convinced someone was in the room waiting to kill him.

Two weeks ago, he was admitted into the hospital because he was having problems eating. Although the doctor told us that he was getting better, my mother still urged my sisters and me to visit him. When we arrived, he was sitting up in his bed, with one eye half open. His eyes were watery and he had trouble opening them. He was the skinniest I had ever seen him; his cheekbones protruded and he breathed loudly from his toothless mouth, his lips seemed to flap as he exhaled. He had plastic tubes in his nose, the kind you see on television. There was blood on the tops of his hands, from where he had tried to yank out the IV needles multiple times. Around his wrists were scraps of cloth tied to the sides of his bed to keep him from pulling at the cords. My sisters and I each took turns talking to him, placing our fingers in the palm of his right hand as he squeezed them to let us know he could hear our trite words of assurance. He never looked directly at us; he couldn’t move his head high enough. But he was awake. My older sister started to cry and had to leave the room. He was getting better, we were told. He would be scheduled for surgery in a week or so to help him digest his food properly.

A few days later my younger sister called me at four in the morning to tell me he had passed away. I knew what had happened before I answered the call. He had died in the middle of the night, in his sleep. No one was with him. I don’t like to think he was lying there awake when it happened, blinking into the darkness, wondering where everyone had gone.