When we moved Dad to the care facility, his only complaint was the Wi-Fi. “Laggy,” he called it when he was having a good day. “Fucking piece of shit,” he called it the rest of the time.

At first I was relieved. I’d been worried that he’d bristle at the cramped room, like a zoo animal pacing its enclosure in a sad documentary. But he never said a word about the bedsit quarters or the unfamiliar, ever-churning staff. He didn’t mind the food, which was prescription and bland, delivered from the All-Mart pharmacy (though once management caught him drone-dashing tacos in through the open window). He never complained, as long as the Wi-Fi was working and he could sit up gaming in his railed hospital bed. When the Wi-Fi was down, however, he’d spit and rage, sulk and mutter, throw his food on the floor and his silverware at the nurses. Civil disobedience tactics from the bad old days.

Dad had told me once—when I was old enough to smoke out with him, and his high had turned morose—that he had unpleasant, shameful memories of visiting his grandmother in the nursing home, back when he was a young kid with a paper route. Twice a week he brought her a newspaper she didn’t read, hoping she’d be asleep so he could slip out quickly, holding his breath against the smell of the place. Then his family had moved away, leaving her alone in that backfield rural town they’d moved her to, and she’d died barely a month later. For years Dad felt sure he’d killed her with his absence.

It was the kind of twentieth-century family trauma that seemed to stick to all of us: his father, and him, and me. After that, his father, my Grampa, had been adamant about wanting to die in the house he’d paid off, to hang on to that little bit of middle-class capital he’d earned with a lifetime of office doldrums. Dad had kept working even after we won UBI, taking slimy corporate gigs he hated to pay out of pocket for Grampa’s in-home care. When Grampa passed, Dad just held on to the house, letting it sit empty while he bounced from one set of fractious roommates to the next—the long tail of millennial antisocial sociality.

Then Dad started falling, and that wasn’t something we could ask roommates to handle—helping him in and out of bed or on and off the toilet. My sister Aurora and I were both traveling a lot for work, her on tour dancing with The Five Thousand, me on the big Gen2 solar install, studying for my team captain cert. Delicate career moments, we thought, and it felt like our responsibilities to our collectives were bigger than those we owed to family. So we told ourselves dad would be fine in state care. Wasn’t this why we lived in a society?

But the Wi-Fi thing was new. When it was down, Dad couldn’t connect his vintage PC rig to whatever old guy hobbyist servers ran the ancient games he liked. Dad had always been a gamer—a word that for my generation had become synonymous with addiction, reaction, climate inaction, and health atrophy. But he’d kept it balanced, I’d thought. He walked a lot, did a little gardening and cooking, had a jam band with his roommates, helped out with catering whenever there was local storm cleanup. But that was before the falls.

“A lot of men of his generation relapse into old digital fixations when they start to lose mobility,” a nurse explained, the third time Dad acted up. It was why they offered Wi-Fi in the first place, I found out. Residents needed it to access the abandonware they felt most comfortable with, which wasn’t in the modern HiBand stacks. I offered a few times to get Dad a headset to play games with, ones I could join him in from my yurt, camped out in overgrown parking lots near the job sites, but he didn’t want it. He didn’t like the newer games, with their federally mandated screentime limits, their gentle, prosocial storylines. The mindfulness reminders made him feel condescended to and coddled. He didn’t even like the newer hardware. He threw a controller I brought him across the room, called it “cardboard fuckshit,” and went back to his greasy, faded plastic.

Sometimes I thought this was Dad’s version of wanting to die in his own house, in a place that was familiar and unchanging. Other times I thought he was just being a dick. It hurt to see him chasing off physical therapists, stuck in his bed, reduced to surly snarling at a screen. I wanted him to have the rich social life he’d had before. I wanted him to spend his last years outside, to taste the air we were scrubbing and see the forests we were growing. I wanted him to feel excited about the world we were building. But he didn’t seem to want any of that. This new Dad just wanted to game.

He was good at it, too. Old hand-eye muscle memories came back, even as more recent capacities started to fade. He took all the new anti-dementia meds, but some days when I called in, I could tell it took energy to remember where I was in life, my partner’s name, maybe even my name. Current events were lost on him—though, with their residents mostly past voting age, the facility didn’t offer much news. But he could no-scope zombies in Call of Duty. He could speedrun Mario levels. He had strong opinions about Starcraft strats.

For a while I tried to meet him where he was. I followed links to the deadweb where he hung out, swallowing my generation’s distaste of animated violence. He had a whole crowd he gamed with, college buddies and randos, all chattering on a clone of long-gone Discord. “The boys,” he called them, though their voices all had that creaky old-man timbre. They told jokes I didn’t get, shouted obscenities I didn’t like. I was glad he wasn’t alone, but it wasn’t my scene.

I stopped calling so much, or visiting. I left him to it, I guess, his gaming and, it turned out, his dying.

It was his pals who let me know he’d taken a turn. Something on the stroke-spectrum; it came on so fast, they never found out for sure. Before the facility even called me, I got a ping from the server that I’d joined and muted. They were seeing him off, the message said, and if I couldn’t get to Dad in person, maybe I could be there in-game.

So I caught a ride back to Sacramento, where they had a vintage gaming parlor. I logged in to the Discord and the survival-shooter they were playing. No one was doing much of anything, just building a tower and tearing it down again. They were all just waiting, talking to Dad about fond memories, distracting him from the pain. Occasionally someone would shoot someone else, and they’d all guffaw, run around the corpse while waiting for the respawn. I got the impression that these new-old friends of his had done this kind of thing before, maybe did it a lot, watching each other die in this deathless world. In a way I felt like an intruder, even though it was my own father at the center of things. I found myself bitter that all this had become more real to Dad than I was, than the legacy he was leaving with Aurora and me.

Mostly though, it was strange. Strange hearing his voice grow ragged and weak while his character still leapt across the digital terrain, swinging a pickaxe or a shotgun. Over time his wheezing got softer, and I could see his movements get less sure, his inputs less precise. Then he was quiet, and for a minute his character sprinted toward the edge of the map, his eyes closed but his hands still on the controller. Everyone said goodbye and shot their guns into the air. And then Dad winked out, his system turned off by the nurse.

When I miss Dad now, I miss who he was before, before the falls and the care and the games. But I was glad to have been there with him at the end, in a world he’d chosen, with friends who told me it was always good to hear his voice.