I finished my shift today, the usual ache in my shoulders, the smell of grease and stale metal clinging to my clothes, and for the first time in what feels like forever, there wasn’t that familiar, cold knot in my stomach. The knot that screams *hurry, hurry, she needs you, what if something happened while you were gone*. He was gone. My dad. Sixty years old, pushing himself through twelve-hour shifts because he thought he had to. Because *I* thought he had to. And now he’s gone, and all I feel is… empty. Not grief, not yet. Just this vast, echoing emptiness where the panic used to be. For years, it was just me. Just me figuring out what the doctors meant, just me trying to explain to his increasingly confused brain why he couldn't drive anymore, just me cleaning up after accidents and making sure he ate something other than ice cream for dinner. My siblings, of course, were too busy with their *actual lives*. Their careers, their families, their weekends that didn't involve wiping someone else's parent. I gave up so much, put everything on hold, because that's what you do, right? You provide. You care. You sacrifice. And now the thing I was sacrificing for—the only thing, really—is gone. And the anger is just simmering, a low, constant burn under the surface. I keep thinking about that factory, the deafening clang of machinery, the way he’d come home so bone-tired he could barely speak. All for what? So I could keep pushing him to eat, to remember, to just *be* there? I hated it. I hated his decline, hated the way he looked at me sometimes like I was a stranger, hated the endless cycle of repetition and worry. And now that it’s over, now that the immediate, pressing need has vanished, I’m just left with this—this quiet fury. At him, for not taking care of himself sooner. At my siblings, for their convenient disappearances. And mostly, I think, at myself. For letting it consume me so completely that I don't even know who I am without that burden. What do I do now? (The silence is deafening.)