Actress Amanda Peet has shared about her own recent health challenge, which was discovered as both of her parents were in the final stages of their lives.

She wrote about the diagnosis, sharing the news with her family and her parents’ death in an essay for The New Yorker called “My Season of Ativan.”

Peet said she had been told that she had dense breast tissue that needed extra monitoring, so she had every six-month appointments for checkups.

She said last year, on the Friday before Labor Day, she went in for what she thought would be a routine scan, but instead of chatting, her doctor, whom she called “Dr. K,” was silent, then said that “she didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy.”

Peet eventually confirmed the diagnosis with a text from her doctor, that they found a tumor that “appeared” to be small, but an MRI was needed to see how bad it was.

She shared the news with her two oldest friends, her husband and her sister, but she was not able to share the news with the woman she shared everything with, her mother.

Despite living only 20 feet away, her mother was in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease, Peet said.

She also got more devastating news: her father, who had been divorced from her mother for a long time, lived on the East Coast and “was about to die.”

Both parents had been in hospice, her mother for several months, her father, only a week.

Peet flew to New York, but didn’t make it before he died. She was able to see him before he was transported from his apartment about two hours after his death, she explained.

Shortly after his death, Peet and her sister, who is a doctor, flew back to Los Angeles for news of her own health.

Eventually, Peet said, after undergoing tests, she would need only a lumpectomy and radiation, not chemotherapy or a double mastectomy. He had hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative breast cancer.

After she found out her own diagnosis, she went to her mother, whom she had not seen in quite a while despite living only feet away from each other, and shared how she spent the final moments as her mother passed.

“The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision,” Peet wrote. “We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”

Peet said she wasn’t sure if her mother knew it was her, or just “disembodied shapes,” but told her the phrase her mother would use to greet the actress, “hoody doodle.”

The essay ends with, “But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything.”

Peet also shared that her scan at the beginning of the year was clear.

Friends of “The Whole Nine Yards” actress have shown support online after the publication of the essay.

Sarah Paulson called the piece “the most profoundly gorgeous essay about the loss of her parents, while dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis,” E! News reported.

“Family Ties” actress Justine Batement wrote, Amanda Peet is a great writer. Her complicated and devastating-sounding season for The @NewYorker" and shared a link to the essay.

Click here to read the entire essay; it may be emotional for some readers.

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