November 11, 2025
CW: Death
Dad died of his first heart attack this summer, barely a week after his 57th birthday.
The first call I got at 11:30 pm was from mom, who lived with her and my brother in Toronto. She says not to worry, but dad is in the hospital, and I should plan to visit him first thing tomorrow morning.
She calls again 15 minutes later, and says I should try to go back that night.
He called for the last time at midnight and asked me where I was. I’m sitting in the cab right now, I say. She says vaguely, I think you’re too late. But you should still try to get it back. I tell the driver to please speed up a bit on the highway if he feels comfortable doing so, and he does, and I’m grateful.
I reach the hospital at 1:30. When I told her who I was here to see, the nurse stared at me for a long time. She asks if my mom told me the news, and that’s the moment I know for sure (except it still doesn’t feel quite real). I lie and say yes, and she looks at me for a while, scrutinizing. Then she takes me to the room with my father’s dead body and the rest of my family. Even when I press one last kiss to his forehead, he still doesn’t calm down.
I learn the story later. After dinner, father went upstairs to lie down, but he woke up due to severe chest pain. He vomits, which he never does, and tells mom to call 911 immediately. She does so and explains all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her they have sent for an ambulance, and they should be ready to go.
So they get ready, and then they wait. They wait for 15 minutes, my dad is in extreme pain, and nothing happens.
The mother calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. The dispatcher replies that there is no visibility on it. She asks if she should take my dad to the hospital and is advised the best thing to do is to wait.
So they wait for the next 15 minutes, and still no one comes. The house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes from a major highway, a ten-minute drive from the hospital.
Mother decided that they should not wait. She and my brother help dad into the car, and they take him to the hospital.
(My brother takes us back the next day to get his stuff. At an intersection, he says, “She told me to be careful when turning left. Those were her last words to me.” In all likelihood they were her last words.)
They reach the entrance of the emergency room. Dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, walks forward and dies on the front steps of the hospital.
Whenever I think about this sequence of events, I feel dizzy. I don’t understand it, except that I understand Moloch’s modus operandi very well. I don’t understand why this was allowed, but it’s certainly something that happens every day. I don’t understand why the dispatcher didn’t say to my mom, “If you have a car, use that, it’s faster”, but I can feel the importance of all the incentives behind it.
I don’t understand why the common thing I was told was that we were All Growing up one was told that one should wait for an ambulance when everything is over, except I know that institutions don’t see themselves clearly and they often don’t know what they do. I don’t understand why Later, the people we explained this to nodded understandingly and said, “Oh, sure, we all know ambulances are slow and horrible and really are transport of last resort, that’s understandable but it’s a shame you didn’t get this update”. Except that I understand it too.
Now I have updated. And now it’s too late.
My dad is dead because his family members were too naive to know that what they were instructed to do by the state was a lie.
I don’t know if you should update on this if you don’t live in Toronto, or if things are so bad because of the chronic EMT shortage and it will get better in some uncertain time, or if we caught them on a bad night, or what.
All I know is that my family waited for 30 minutes for an ambulance which did not come and now my dad has died.
#diary #longform