I heard the words—heart attack. But he was strangely smiling out at me through the plastic, as if this was just a very funny situation to find yourself in. Possibly he didn’t want me to be afraid, though I wasn’t. He was large under the sheets, but didn’t look sick. He was breathing normally, it seemed to me. His doctor, Dr. Hageman, must’ve told my mother and him many things (I of course wasn’t told anything): that Parker could be fine; though also that his life could now be shortened; that he should lose weight, work less, not smoke, take exercise, not drink, find a hobby, possibly even should put his affairs in order. People knew less about heart attacks then. But no one took it lightly. And while I could not have said so, I must have sensed, just from being present beside them, that wherever life had seemed to be going before, it might be going there differently now. Or it might be going somewhere else. Here was change. His mother did not come down from Atkins to see him, though Bennie and Essie did.

IT’S TEMPTING, AS I sit here sixty-eight years later, to focus a shadowy, melodramatic light on my father’s remaining life; to see it as the time between his heart attack and before he would suddenly die. This would be accurate, since that is what that time was. Again, Dr. Hageman would’ve told him what was wrong—the heart murmur—and about how things could go; that the time ahead was unassured. Death was a likelihood, but nothing more was ordained. He was alive now. These things he knew. And yet it is also true that this period, between 1948 and 1960, encompasses the entire time—I can say it now—that I knew my father not just as a father or the father, but was the only time and the only terms under which I fully realized I had a father. To write a memoir and to consider the importance of another human being is to try to credit what might otherwise go unremarked—partly by acknowledging that mysteries lie within us all, and by identifying within those mysteries, virtues. Once more, it’s not so different from what we find when we read a story by Chekhov, nor is it probably very different from the problem any son faces when thinking about and estimating his parents. The truest life, of course, is always the life that’s lived. But how I, his only child, can best credit and characterize my father’s life and its virtues is as he lived it in my gaze, which is to say, without the overlay of later, unhappy knowledge, life lived as if there would always be a tomorrow, right to the moment when there was not.

SO THEN, THE LAST TWELVE YEARS of my father’s earthly life. It is little easier than the early parts to make clear, since he was, again, not there with us much. What I remember of him between my ages five and sixteen, in fact, stands away from time like islands in the horizon-to-horizon sea of his absence. Things that took place when I was nine mingle uncertainly with what happened when I was twelve and fourteen. And if his absence had for a time become a kind of presence, it now became less that, as my own life crowded in with its concerns. Somehow in these years there seems to be less of him even when there was more.

HE RECOVERED—at least in a way he did. There was no surgery, then, for what he had.