Disbelief is often the impetus to pull out a smartphone and snap a photo. As I drifted through the daze of the accident, I relied increasingly on documentation to ground myself in the reality of the experience, photographing each strange, sad, and shocking moment to link it up with the one that came before it: the emergency first responders, moving so slowly I thought my dad would bleed to death before he made it to the hospital; the macho helicopter that carried my dad to Austin, parked dramatically in front of the Texas capital’s granite dome; my hospital cafeteria tray loaded up with rubbery turkey for the world’s saddest Thanksgiving meal. The resulting images provided both distance and proximity to the unfolding trauma — it was mine but also outside of me. So began my evidence gathering.

After the hospital, I returned to the cottage with my cousins to pick up the items we had left behind in our haste — suitcases, my dad’s clothes, the tray of cauliflower we never had time to cook — and photograph the accident site. I descended the steps of the deck and returned to the tree, this time alone. It was an eerily innocent scene: the soft November sun lit up the blonde wood of the fallen tree’s decaying core. (We found out later that it had been dead for two years.) The rope swing sat to the side, still attached to the tree on chains. A fresh breeze rustled leaves where my dad had been lying, now matted to the ground with blood. A kelly-green birdhouse clung to the part of the trunk that still stood upright. I could hear the light gurgling of the creek in the distance.

“I always feel a sense of peace come over me when I look out at the yard,” our hosts had written beneath a photo of the yard on their Airbnb listing, the company’s insignia floating just pixels from where the trunk later split in two. As I revisited the listing to screengrab photos, I felt bad for our hosts: it was unlikely that their beloved view would ever inspire that feeling again. They didn’t seem like bad people, at least, not from the brief impression they made at the hospital, where they showed up soon after my family and I arrived.

At first I had no idea who they were or why they were there. (My sister had texted them.) But through the blur of emotions and tears, somehow I grasped that they belonged in this small holding room with all of our closest family: my mom, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandmother, and “the Airbnb people,” as they soon became called. As I paced around the hospital wing for hours, they camped out in the lobby, clearly devastated. When the neurologist told us there was no choice but to take my dad off life support and that it was time to start saying our goodbyes, they cried when they found out. Then, my uncle suggested they say goodbye to us as well, and they left.

A few hours later, my dad took his final breath.

That night, back at my aunt’s house in Austin, we silently ate pumpkin pie and lit the Hanukkah candles, joylessly going through the motions of tradition. As I sat watching the flames flicker, that day’s violent movie streaming in my mind (as it’d continue to do so, nearly non-stop, for months), the realization that we had booked a second night at the cabin suddenly jarred me. Had the company been told about the accident? What was there to even say? I logged on to Aibrnb’s website and looked up the customer service number.

“There was an accident, and we’ll need a refund.”

I remember uttering an approximation of those feeble words to the chipper customer service agent who answered Airbnb’s hotline, his voice young and sweet, clearly not yet jaded by the job. A tree fell on my dad, and what are you gonna do about it, and how would that look to see “Airbnb Killed My Dad” on the internet. The guy panicked, as expected, put me on hold, then asked to call back. Later, I spoke to a higher-up, collected myself and said, “Let’s talk about this another day.”

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to get out of the phone call, exactly. I knew that I was letting emotion and shock rule my response. But for some reason, remembering that it was Airbnb who had led us to this deadly cottage made the incident feel suddenly, oddly personal. As a journalist who has written for startup-cheerleading publications like Fast Company and Good, I’d spent much of the past few years writing about the emergence of the sharing economy from a highly supportive perspective. While covering a community hearing about a proposed ban on Airbnb in Los Angeles two months before my dad’s death, I was far more sympathetic to Airbnb supporters — the hosts claiming the website helped them pull their homes out of foreclosure — than to its detractors — bitter neighbors complaining about Airbnb guests snatching their parking spots and making noise at night. Moreover, as a traveler who had booked accommodations through Airbnb all over the world, I had trusted the platform and “community” enough to introduce it to my family.

Three months before my father’s death, I convinced my parents to use Airbnb for the first time while visiting me. Though my mom was skeptical about a stranger’s standards for cleanliness — she made me email our host to make him promise the loft would be spotless — they were both quickly sold on the rental apartment, with its sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and endless sunshine streaming in through oversized, industrial windows. My dad seemed particularly grateful to get an insider’s perspective of the city that corporate hotels couldn’t offer. I remember him full of life that weekend, swimming in the building’s communal pool, hustling to make sure we got to our dinner reservations on time, and returning to the East Coast feeling refreshed.

I’m reminded of that weekend whenever I go back to that apartment (our host had crashed with family in the building during our stay, and we became friends) but also, whenever I revisit past correspondence with my dad, nostalgic for the chance to communicate with him. “Thanks for organizing an incredible venue,” he wrote in a text message after he got home, the penultimate one I’d ever receive from him. “I’m so proud to be your dad.”