I'll never forget the sound my daughter made when she died

I’ll never forget the sound my daughter made when she died. She had spent a week in the full throes of death, unable to walk, unable to talk, unable to eat. She had been fully lucid the entire time, though, and the misery in her eyes was a deep and abiding thing that we’ll never escape, and for which we’ll never forgive ourselves for not ending it, for not taking her out back and shooting her in the head when the first pains hit.<br><br>It’s not our fault, we knew even then, but we’ll never forgive ourselves, and we’ll never forgive the thing that killed her.<br><br>It began with a rash, a small red blister on her lower back that seemed to grow a little bigger every day. At first, we thought it was just a bug bite, and we treated it as such, thinking little more of it other than that it must have been from a particularly nasty spider. When it didn’t heal, though, we took her to the doctor.<br><br>He said it was cancer, and that it had already spread. He recommended chemo, but said that our daughter would likely not live longer than another month or two. We tried the chemo anyway, but it only seemed to make things worse. She grew weak and sickly, unable to keep anything down as nausea wracked her small frame.<br><br>We took her home, and watched as she shrunk down into herself, unable to walk or stand or even sit up. She screamed for a while, then whimpered for a while longer, but eventually she just sort of… accepting it seemed almost. She would constantly watch cartoons or play with stuffed animals, and would ask for food that she knew she couldn’t eat. Watching her eat a cracker just for it to spew out all over her seconds later is a sight I will never get out of my head.<br><br>But the day she died was the worst day of our lives. She was in agony, and nothing seemed to help. She’d gotten past the acceptance stage, it seemed, and was now just angry. She would lash out at us, and would sometimes try to attack us, although she was so weak and in so much pain that it was more sad to watch than it was scary. <br><br>Around 3 am that morning, she started making that sound. It was a low sound, but it was loud, and it was almost animalistic. It sounded like she was trying to talk, but couldn’t quite manage it, and was instead just letting out these grunts.<br><br>She stopped moving shortly after that, and we thought she was gone. She was still breathing though, so we just held her and talked to her until she died the next morning.<br><br>That night was the worst night of our lives, and we’ll never forget it. The sound our daughter made in her last couple hours on this earth will resonate in our hearts forever, and will likely be the last thing that we remember when we die.<br><br>That night, we found out just how cruel the natural world could be, and how it didn’t care at all for our pain. I hope none of you ever have to go through anything like that.<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>We found out some time later that the whole family had been contaminated by something called Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, or dioxin, for short. Dioxin is a part of the Agent Orange nerve agent used during the Vietnam war to clear foliage and kill people.<br><br>We tracked down the source of the contamination to an old chemical plant near our house. It had been abandoned for a long time, but the family moved in about a year before our daughter fell ill. They had been secretly working to produce Agent Orange again, and had somehow managed to contaminate part of the local water supply. <br><br>Our daughter was the only casualty thus far. The plant was shut down again as soon as the source of contamination was discovered, and we’ll be receiving a large sum of money as compensation.<br><br>The money will help us pay for a new house, in a new part of the country, and it will help us find a good therapist. <br><br>It won’t bring back our daughter. It won’t take away the sound she made before she died.<br><br>The sound of her dying. The last sound she’ll ever make.<br><br>That sound is etched into our hearts, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to forget it.