I'm Celine — known to most as The Health Detective. I'm a nutrition counsellor who reads the body like a case file, following the clues behind how women feel through midlife. After several years in Spain, we recently packed our lives into suitcases and returned to Vancouver. This is my first time writing about grief. It isn't my usual territory, but it kept leading me back to familiar ground: how we eat, and what food carries after loss. (thehealthdetective.ca)
What my father’s last two weeks taught me about being present — and about the questions no one thought to ask.
For twenty years I’ve made my living designing websites. Nutrition was the quiet obsession
running underneath all of it — thirty-five years of workshops, one-on-one training, and reading late into the night. It only became official recently: I went back to school and qualified as a nutrition counsellor, a gift I gave myself the year I turned sixty-five.
Somewhere along the way — during Covid, while I was building a small platform called the
Love Yourself Project Official, and while my own body handed me a diabetes diagnosis and a stretch of near-blindness before cataract surgery could finally happen — I learned the thing that shapes how I think about food now. Eating is rarely only about food. It carries emotion, memory, the whole weight of a family. I came to call it Inherited Plates.
Nothing taught me that more plainly than my father’s last two weeks. And yet, when the time came, the meals that mattered most weren’t about nutrition at all.
My daughters bought them. They chose — kids’-meal portions, mostly, small enough that we wouldn’t overeat, big enough to keep us upright. We weren’t hungry in the ordinary sense. We ate the way you eat when your body is running on something other than appetite, when you know you have to keep your strength up because someone is counting on you to be there. What nourished me those two weeks wasn’t the food. It was sitting beside my girls while eating it.
I hadn’t spent that much unbroken time with them in years.
They have their own lives now — my older daughter is forty, my younger one thirty-seven — and my weekly visits to my dad had quietly become one of the only ways I could physically be in a room with them. We stay in touch by text and shared photos. But this was different. This was hours together, day after day, even when we sat in silence.
The long ride
I don’t drive — not because I can’t, but because I choose not to. More than 10 years in Spain taught me that. Over there you walk everywhere, and I’d watch elderly men and women making their way uphill and down with their bags of groceries, some of them bent with arthritis, still moving, still out in the world. Movement made people happier. A chore like the market became a social event, because you never knew who you’d run into. It was never about how quickly I got somewhere — if something were truly urgent, I’d call a Lyft. It was about arriving without the stress of traffic or parking, arriving on time because I’d planned for it.
So, the care facility being an hour and forty-five minutes away by transit, each way, never felt like a burden. I came to know that route the way you know a rosary. The bus along Marine Drive, the water opening up on one side — that stretch became my calming element, the place where I let the day land before I arrived, and again before I carried it home. I’d watch the city go by and think about the man waiting at the other end of the line.
We built a rhythm, the three of us. My older daughter decided early that he would never spend a night alone, so she slept in his room. My younger daughter would arrive at six-thirty or seven each morning to relieve her, so her sister could go home and have breakfast with her four-year-old and her husband — a few ordinary hours stolen back from the vigil. Then everyone would be back together by noon, and we’d begin again.
Some of the most tender moments were the least dramatic. My daughters would take their work calls right there in his room — leading meetings, talking to their teams — and I’d sit there beaming, so proud of the women they’d become. I’m certain my dad heard them. They say hearing is the last sense to go. I am sure he was proud too, listening to his granddaughters run their corner of the world from a chair beside his bed.
The slow goodbye
The decline came in a way that, looking back, we should have read differently.
On July 3, John and I visited. We brought him Chinese food and a slice of mocha cake, the way we always did. But he wouldn’t wake up enough to eat. He drank a little chocolate milk with his eyes closed — pursing his lips just enough to tell you he wanted it.
Sometimes I used to think he was teasing us. I touched a small noodle to his mouth, and he pushed against the spoon. Usually, the smell or taste of food was enough to open his eyes and let him enjoy the visit. Not that day. That day he only wanted to rest. After forty minutes together in the “Country Kitchen,” we wheeled him back to the dining area to return his bib, plate and cutlery.
That’s when they told us to stop bringing outside food — he could only manage very soft
textures now. He’d been choking at breakfast, partly from not chewing, partly from dehydration, which quietly lowers saliva and makes swallowing harder. As a nutrition counsellor, I knew exactly what that meant. As a daughter, I just heard that the visits I’d built around bringing him something he loved were over.
So, on my next visit, Sunday, July 12, I brought mango pudding. Soft. Allowed. The nurse told me he’d eaten his whole breakfast that morning — though it had taken almost an hour. I’d come early and, for once, his eyes were open. I fed him the pudding before his lunch even arrived. Dessert first — because who says, as adults, we can’t? His lunch came, and it was quiche. Soft, yes, but not the mashed food I’d been told to expect the week before. My younger daughter, sitting with us, offered to run out for chicken nuggets if he didn’t want his quiche. He ate three-quarters of the mango pudding and nothing else, then said he wanted to go back to his room. We waited for the caregivers to settle him into bed, and then we left.
I didn’t know it was the last real meal I would ever feed him.
The Monday that changed everything
On Monday, July 13, at around half past three, the group chat started.
He hadn’t eaten dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch. He’d refused his medication that morning. The doctor — not his regular doctor, who was away — thought he might be close to the end of life.
Here is the part I keep turning over. This had happened before. He would skip two or three
meals and then eat again. At ninety-four, we knew he would die sooner rather than later — but the assessment that Monday was made by people who didn’t really know him. A new doctor. New caregivers. They read a couple of skipped meals and a refused pill through fresh eyes, without the context of everything that had come before.
The words comfort care weren’t even shared with us until Wednesday. The call came to a
family member, and faced with hard news from a doctor she’d never met, the instruction was simply to keep him comfortable. It’s what any of us might have said in that moment. What none of us understood was how quickly it would move — that by that Monday afternoon it would already be set, and once it was, there was no going back. No more food. No more liquids.
What I wish, looking back, is that someone had thought to ask the people who were there every day — especially my daughters, who knew his routines, his good days and his bad ones — before the course was decided. Not to override anyone. Just to add what we’d seen. But the days move fast in a place like that, and by the time we truly understood what was happening, we were already inside it.
On Tuesday, a nurse told us that today would be the day.
He held on for twelve more.
Twelve days
Twelve days of watching my father die slowly. Of watching him wince. The one thing I could do — the only thing — was keep his mouth from going dry. There was a gel, a powder you mix with warm water, and little sponges on sticks that I took to calling jelly pops. Do you want more jelly pops? I’d ask him. Sometimes I’d get the faintest gesture in return. Sometimes his mouth would simply be open, waiting, and when I touched the sponge to his lips, he would purse them and squeeze — the very same small motion he’d made over his chocolate milk weeks before — drawing the liquid in to soothe the dryness. It was almost nothing. It was everything I had left to give him. His regular doctor came back on July 20. My daughter raised her concerns, and all of them were valid. Every what-if we’d been holding came out at once. Would he have suffered less if we’d simply left things the way they were? Or was the course they took the right one after all?
I still don’t have an answer. I’m not sure a person is meant to.
The last message
He died on Saturday, July 25 — a week, almost to the day, before the anniversary of my
mother’s death four years ago on August 1. The first week of August will never be an ordinary week again.
That evening I’d left around five. John and I had planned to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Dundarave, and I got there early and ordered. At 6:41, my daughter sent a message I didn’t see. A minute or two later, my phone rang. She asked if I’d read it. I hadn’t. She told me she thought my dad had just gone — the nurse had been standing right there, about to give his hydromorphone, when his eyes opened one last time.
My daughters were with him. My oldest niece too. I’m grateful for that, more than I can say — that he was not, in the end, alone. I ate quickly and went back. By the time I arrived at a quarter to nine, everyone was there except my youngest niece, who arrived shortly after I did. I left just before ten and took a Lyft home. I didn’t trust myself to manage three bus transfers that late, that undone.
Where I am now
I’m writing this on the one-week anniversary, with my mother’s anniversary right behind it, and I am still so sad. The tears come at any hour, day or night, and I’ve stopped trying to schedule them.
I’m learning what my body does with grief I can’t quite release. It holds it. I’ve been more tense than usual, so every four or five days I go for a Flow massage at my favourite Thai place, when my usual therapist is available. I need it. I walk — I’m lucky to live somewhere quiet, water and forest both within ten minutes on foot — and I take the bus along Marine Drive just to watch the water, the same view that carried me to and from him for two weeks.
When it’s too much, I put on a soothing face mask and under-eye patches for the puffiness that comes with crying, lie down, and let the day be smaller. I’ve pulled back from client work until I can trust myself to give people all of my attention, because right now I can’t, and they deserve nothing less.
I don’t have a tidy ending, because grief doesn’t come with one. What I have is this: for two weeks, three women made sure that a ninety-four-year-old man was never once left alone. When there was nothing left we could feed him, there were still the jelly pops, and we gave him those to the very end, so his mouth would never go dry. My daughters ran their whole busy lives from a chair by his bed so his last days would be full of the sound of the people who loved him.
If there’s anything I’d want another woman to take from this, it’s simpler than any advice I give in my practice. Be the one who asks the questions. Be in the room. And when the time comes, make sure no one you love has to do the leaving on their own.
In loving memory — and with gratitude to my daughters who kept the vigil.
READ MORE > Her Story, Rambler Cafe Blog
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