Editor’s note: The author of this essay has chosen to be identified by their initials for fear of personal repercussions from its publication.

My hometown of Spokane, Washington, is plagued by the mountain pine beetle. It is small and unassuming, with its muted brown shell suggesting no more danger than any other insect. Its effect is catastrophic. It burrows into large ponderosa pines and destroys the middle of its trunks, ravaging trees from the inside out.

Ask an ecologically-minded Spokanite about the beetle and they’re likely to burn with indignation. The ponderosa pine is a symbol of the city, an ardent protector with a lifespan that dwarfs our own. To watch one of these trees decay is to feel your conception of permanence and strength, a feature of your world which grounds you within it, slip away.

I’m not sure if I remember how old I was when I realized my father was an alcoholic. Looking back, I must have had an inclination that it was not normal to habitually drink four or five glasses of whiskey with dinner, but this never struck me as a problem. Certainly, he didn’t fit the bill: My father was always a gentle, gregarious, highly intelligent man, anathema to the cartoonish depictions of alcoholics I’d seen on TV. Whatever my dad was drinking, I seemed to reason, couldn’t have been that same tincture of antisociality, aggression and stupidity that filled Homer Simpson’s cup.

Perhaps this is why his sudden decline over the last decade has come as such a shock. My 63-year-old father is no longer the energetic force of nature he once was. He walks slowly, and his hand shakes when he drinks a glass of water. The family discussions he used to love are marked by his absence as much as his presence; he misses much of the conversation around him. His drinking itself has slowed — my sister, Chiara, recently told me that he’s “only” having a few drinks each day, coupled with “five or 10” cigarettes.

I’ve recently come to harbor a deep anxiety around my father’s health. It’s clear that something has shifted in the past few years, and that my dad will soon benefit from the variety of care that can only be brought by a child living nearby. Increasingly, I feel that this duty must, or maybe simply will, fall on me. My senior year of college has been beset by a strange decision paralysis, bound between fulfilling my parents’ wish that I strike out independently and my more fundamental duty to ensure my dad has a peaceful old age.

My father is many things. He is, admittedly, an alcoholic. He is also an unparalleled parent, raising me and my three siblings nearly singlehandedly. Most importantly, he is the most resilient person I’ve ever met, surviving (in my lifetime alone) his brother’s suicide, the death of both of his parents, an estrangement from his sister, constant racial antagonism in the post-9/11 era, crippling debt and bankruptcy and a divorce — all while projecting a strength and surety for which I owe him an impossible debt.

He has never, however, been someone who “doesn’t care.” These were the exact words he used to describe his reticence to schedule a doctor’s appointment, or see his longtime friends, to Chiara and myself in a crowded Calgary restaurant last month. All at once, a complicated truth was made simple: He would not get better alone. I might have to move home, or Chiara might have to stay home, or both.

Shortly after, Chiara and I had been sitting at the dinner table in my dad’s apartment discussing what comes next. If he agreed to go to the doctor, we would figure out a solution. If not, a harder conversation was coming: We were each waiting for notice from graduate programs that were far away from my dad’s Calgary home. Each of us had deep passion and ambition, and had sunk our entire adult lives into the prospect of, respectively, law school and a doctoral program. We looked out the window at the barren desolation of a city beset by a zero-degree winter. There was nothing to be heard or seen; the room and the city around us were silent and sparse.

My dad walked in and halfheartedly greeted us. He sat down and said, “So, I have something to tell you …”

My heart sank. Chiara and I looked at each other with dismay. Silently, we each recognized that we’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a long time. He looked from side to side, smiled and told us he was kidding. He had no news to share.

Chiara broke into tears anyway.

Leaving Calgary, I had the strange feeling that time was accelerating. I was not prepared to make a decision this monumental yet. Alberta’s frosted plains threatened to swallow my car whole, their expanse suggesting a tantalizingly infinite present.

Is it a betrayal to ignore the clawing sense that my dad would prefer I leave him in Calgary and move back anyway? Is it worse to ignore the almost physically-manifest guilt involved in leaving home to chase the life of academia and achievement that I’d always dreamed of? Is there a way to have both, or am I condemned to wish I’d spent more time in one place or the other? Hours flew by as my car tore down the Trans-Canada Highway.

More fundamentally, do I know myself or my father well enough to decide?

Parents, I think, are first understood in media res. We are born to fully formed adults, whose neuroses and pathologies appear ancient and inevitable. Your dad is your dad, your mom is your mom and you play the hand you were dealt.

The trade, though, is that you cannot be made to understand their formative losses, loves, dreams or memories. For the diasporic child, this is a gentle mercy. I will never comprehend the loss my father endured when his family left Pakistan or the grief and fear he felt when his home was set ablaze by a white supremacist mob in the U.K. I cannot understand the unique devastation of being raised by a mother who’d lost a dozen siblings, such is the nature of a generation of removal from colonialism.

The immediate task of the young adult, however, is to try. As your parents round into people and as your own experience of the world becomes fuller, so too does your immense sense of the past and the weight of history. My father’s alcoholism, depression and general physical decline are inseparable from the same colonial, extractive legacy which has determined much of the rest of his life — knowing this is cold comfort when considering what comes next.

Every time I write about my father, it tends toward the eulogistic. This is unfair. He is still an active adult who is fully capable of making choices to extend his life or increase his self-sufficiency. However, I could never have written this piece another way, nor could that thought ever lessen the duty I feel to ensure his health and bear witness to the rest of his life.

Lately, my mind is filled with images of the pine beetle. It is slow infiltration, it is sudden calamity, it is the death of the familiar and the comfortable and the beloved. It is the nightmarish prospect of invisible decline caught too late, of the unobserved end of a life of self-sacrifice. Pine trees can withstand the beetles’ onslaught for just a year. Their enormous, protective frame is hollowed out until the pine can no longer support its own weight. Another tree falls and no one is around to hear.