I started writing on this website last year, after my father was supposed to have received rehab after leg surgery in January 2008, but instead, after being admitted to a combination "rehabilitation center & skilled nursing facility," received a near fatal dose of a drug with a black box warning against giving it to the elderly.

If I had not been present to witness his seizure that night and yell for help, he would have died then. He was in renal failure and simultaneously suffered a heart attack. All of these things are side effects of the drug he was given behind my stepmother's back, after she had emphatically told them not to give it to him.

Family members have no idea of the rights they give up when they put someone they love in a rehab center or nursing home.

He survived all of that only to be kept on another drug in the same rehab/nursing home, which led to his sharp decline. (My stepmother feared he would be sent to a place even worse; I had no control over his care).

He died almost eight months later, after being sent by the nursing home to the hospital because of "increasing lethargy during the past week." The hospital ER doctor diagnosed him with dehydration and pneumonia.

The hospital doctor told me that his body could not absorb the IV fluids while his lungs were responding positively to the antibiotics. Because his body could no longer absorb fluids, his body's systems were "shutting down," I was told.

That a man who was permanently catheterized (after surviving renal failure) and whose fluid output was supposedly being monitored, could become dehydrated beyond the point of no return, says all you need to know about why he died and who was responsible for his death.

While I have been writing during my whole life, I started writing for the eyes of "the public" when I began writing on this website. I started doing it during an extremely painful time.

But I started when my father was alive. I started when I was putting everything I had into the biggest fight I have ever waged, so far. When you fight to save yourself, that is one thing, but when you fight to save someone you love, that is another. When you fight something so big and so wrong, you begin to understand what evil really means.

During that time, when I listened to many of Bob Dylan's songs, they took on a meaning for me that I had not experienced before. For months, the only music that suited my frame of mind was Bob Dylan's; in particular, "Love and Theft," and "Modern Times."

Some of my best writing during that time period were my letters of complaint to the authorities, which I read and re-read for my father during the eight months he was in the nursing home. I did not limit my letters of complaint to state authorities, and I did not bother with politicians. I made sure to cover my ass. My father found these letters validating.

I became the one person he could count on for the truth, no matter how ugly it was. He knew that what was happening to him was wrong and not natural, or his fault, but he clearly understood what I was up against.

But the writing that means more to me that anything else is my father's obituary, which my stepmother asked me to write.

The next best thing I wrote, and then added to as I spoke, was my eulogy for my father in front of about 80 people. It was the easiest thing I have ever done.

His obituary was about his public life. My eulogy was about who he was on the inside.

As I stepped down from the podium, I felt a powerful surge of energy enter from the top of my head down through to my feet where it practically lifted me off the floor. I had never felt stronger. This energy stayed with me. Instead of leaving me, it assimilated into me and changed me. Think what you want, but it felt like my father giving me his powerful worldly strength, because he didn't need it anymore where he was, and he knew I would know what to do with it.

I will go on.

Carol Shriver residing in NYC and Upstate New York