Text copyright © 2022 by Walter Kirn

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eISBN: 9781542043625

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THE MOTOR HOME PLAN was lunacy, absurd, not only a violation of every health rule governing interstate travel and quarantines and jamming people together in close quarters but an offense against decency and sense. Rick and Dan and a guy I didn’t know, enlisted for his size and muscle strength, would rent a big Winnebago in Montana (“The kind they use on movie sets,” Rick said, “with all the latest features, all the comforts”) and stock it with provisions and equipment, including a costly new reclining armchair that massaged the shoulders and lower back. Depending on the weather, which can’t be relied on in April in Montana, where serious blizzards can strike as late as June, the men would leave as early as next weekend and drive straight through to my father’s winter place in a retirement village south of Tucson, a distance of almost fourteen hundred miles. They thought they might spend two days golfing once they arrived, not rushing the trip back; since my father would not be returning to Arizona, they assumed it might take him longer than he anticipated to settle his affairs there. Then they would situate him in the motor home, making sure he could rest snugly in the recliner, figuring out how to help him reach the toilet, positioning him for a view of the TV set, and conducting a short rehearsal ride to check his susceptibility to motion sickness. If the RV didn’t suit him for some reason, if he chose to opt out of the venture at the last minute, the guys would gladly return alone, Rick told me, but if my father reaffirmed the plan, they’d get him to his cabin in Montana in twenty-four hours, maybe less, breaking every speed limit to do so.

“What if something happens on the way? What if he falls?” I asked Rick over the phone. “What if, in the middle of Utah, late at night, two hundred miles from the nearest town—”

“I know where you’re going with this, and it’s legitimate.”

“He dies,” I said.

“That’s legitimate. I get it.”

“We don’t know what kind of shape he’s in, is all. The last time he let me see him was Super Bowl weekend. He was walking then, barely, but now he says he can’t.”

“I’m thinking let’s abort. You’re right,” Rick said. “I was trying to honor his wishes, that’s all it was. My buddy says he has not much time to live and wants to spend it in nature, at his cabin, watching the deer and eagles from his porch, visiting with his son who lives nearby, and I go into problem-solving mode. Rent a camper. Call up two strong friends. Ignore this pandemic circus and just take action.”

“Which he obviously appreciates,” I said. “Taking action is how he thinks too.”

Rick let this hang there, a little noose of truth I’d tied for myself. His silence was a reproach. He and my father were doers; I was a worrier. I suspected then that my problem with the plan wasn’t its half-baked, risky quality but the fact it would saddle me with an ailing man who, through his gift for theatrical self-pity, had tried my patience at the best of times. Did he really have only months to live? I wondered. I also doubted his diagnosis, as did my cousin Mike, a doctor, my father’s sister’s son. An accomplished orthopedic surgeon, he’d reviewed my father’s scans, observed a pattern of spinal deterioration consistent with loss of sensation in the legs, but detected no sign of ALS, the grave, incurable nerve disorder better known to my father’s generation as Lou Gehrig’s disease. My father didn’t appreciate Mike’s skepticism and stopped communicating with him. I had a theory about this. My father was quite an athlete as a young man, a college football and baseball player of notable stamina and grit. The positions he played were grueling and exhausting but without much glamour: center and catcher. An ailment whose athlete-namesake was dubbed the “Iron Man” might appeal to him in some grim way.

“Let’s do this,” I said to Rick. “I’ll call him and raise my concerns and see what happens. Maybe I’m overreacting. It’s his decision. But my other anxiety besides the trip is how he’ll get the care he’ll need out in the woods, at the end of a dirt road. I can’t lift him. He’ll need help. In Tucson, a city, that’s easy to arrange. But way out in the sticks? And then there are all the COVID complications.”

“I’m sorry. This totally sucks. For everyone.”

“It’ll work itself out,” I said stoically. “It’s life.”

But it wasn’t, of course. I was dreaming. It was death.

THE RESCUE PARTY left Tucson five days later, my father insistent about dying in Montana, and I agreed to meet it at the cabin, which is more of a house but with rustic, woodsy touches. My father built it in 1996, after retiring from his long career as a patent attorney for 3M, the Minnesota-based corporation that gave the world Scotch tape and Post-it notes and scads of similar dull, ubiquitous items—sandpaper, dust masks, scrub pads, furnace filters—that it’s hard to believe are the products of heavy research and once were, before their patent terms expired, the exclusive intellectual property of a single company. It was stock in 3M, as reliable as lumber, that allowed my father to build his house and devote himself for the last two decades to fly-fishing, bird hunting, painting, and doubles tennis. He also lifted weights in his home gyms, not casually but in the form of serious workouts tracked in detailed logs. In December, just four months earlier, he’d still been lifting, trying to strengthen his legs. But then came his diagnosis, and he quit. The day before the motor home arrived, I went to his cabin with my wife, Amanda, to install a rented hospital bed and found that he’d had the weight machines removed from the high-ceilinged family room that they’d once dominated. We set the bed up on the empty rug, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t overstating his expectation for a quick demise.

He showed up in shocking, gruesome shape. Rick and Dan and the burly guy, named Ben, all of them looking dehydrated and crumpled, teamed up to remove him from the Winnebago, whose interior was a squalor of snack chip bags, beverage cans, twisted blankets, and scattered pillows. But they’d done it—they’d brought my father home alive—and now, using protocols learned during the trip, they steered him in his wheelchair to the door, gathered and arranged his withered limbs so they wouldn’t drag or snag on something, and lifted him out and down onto the driveway. He clawed the wheelchair’s joystick with his right hand, strangely elegant in its wasted thinness, and ventured to roll forward without assistance, but the driveway was boggy from melting snow and stopped him. One of his feet slid off its footrest and lost its slipper in the muck, but he didn’t notice, fussing with the joystick and issuing a stream of crabby orders addressed to anyone and no one, as invalids do, since their need for help is constant. I stepped forth from the little greeting party of neighbors, wives, and girlfriends and said, “Hi, Dad.” He acknowledged me with a nod and a wan smile, then returned to the business of the useless joystick, setting his left hand atop his right as though to add force to his attempts. The chair didn’t budge. He looked crazy with frustration. Then he noticed his bare foot and the lost slipper and tried to twist sideways and reach down to fetch it. He failed. It didn’t go well. Nothing did.

By evening, a certain order had been established—the TV moved to face the bed, a side table placed to his right where he could reach it, an arduous bathing procedure that he stripped naked for and that required removing the bathroom door as well as the glass door to the walk-in shower—and we were able at last to sit and talk.

“I want to die fast. Do you understand?” he said. “Montana’s a right-to-die state. That’s why I’m here. When do the hospice people come?”

“Tomorrow, but they can’t enter the house. Not for two weeks. You came from Arizona, so technically you’re in quarantine till then. And you and I have had contact, so I’m bad too now. But Amanda convinced them to meet us in the driveway and pass us the medications and supplies.”

He reached for his cup on the table, a child’s sippy cup filled with ginger ale and ice cubes. The ginger ale had been refrigerated, but for some reason he required lots of ice. He’d grown picky in general.

“Are they bringing morphine?”

“Yes, but it’s not like you think, Dad.” Then I explained. He’d mixed up hospice and assisted suicide, the second of which was legal in Montana but nearly impossible to arrange due to confounding bureaucratic rules. I’d heard that only two doctors in the state were willing to help patients through the thickets, and neither practiced nearby. Hospice, by contrast, kept terminal patients comfortable but didn’t deliberately usher them toward heaven. I told my father to expect from hospice sleeping pills, antianxiety agents, and yes, in a certain measure, opiates. Always a careful listener when his own vital interests were concerned, he quietly nursed at his pink cup lid until I finished my presentation.

“Then we will have to work with that,” he said.

DAYS LATER, in the window near his bed, just to the right of his murmuring TV set, a cinnamon-colored bear appeared, rooting in the fresh grass of the broad meadow that sloped up toward the cliffs behind the cabin. It was a young bear, possibly a yearling, still skinny from its winter fast and looking a bit uncertain about the business of unearthing worms and bugs, as if it was still growing into its own instincts. My father was shakily fussing with a remote, trying to bring up DVR recordings of the show we would watch in a loop, incessantly, until his last hours: Murder, She Wrote. I happened to be standing up, having just fetched from a tray atop his desk his next dose of calming Ativan, and I was aware that the bear was out of view for him, though only slightly. It might walk into view.

“Dad, there’s a bear. I’m watching it dig and eat.”

He strained, unsuccessfully, to raise his head. I saw a cord in his neck I hadn’t seen before, an indication of his rapid weight loss. “Grizzly or black bear?”

“I can’t quite tell. It’s brown. Not very old.”

“Spring’s when you spot them. This damn remote is dead. In the drawer in the laundry room, you’ll find some batteries.”

“It’s moving. Hold on. I think you’ll see it soon.”

“The drawer beside the dryer.”

“It’s stopping. Something scared it. Its ears are up.”

Bafflingly, he wasn’t interested. Proximity to western wildlife, he’d repeatedly made me understand, was his chief reason for building the place and why he hoped I’d keep it in the family after he was gone. Most of his oil paintings were of animals he’d photographed in the vicinity. His neighbors even told a story of how he’d dangerously tolerated a mature male mountain lion that hung around his deck one summer and sometimes slept beneath it as in a den. Now and then in the fall, I’d hunt grouse and partridge with him, but for years he’d declined to fire his gun at them, raising and aiming it in pantomime but too much on their side to drop one. It had been different when I was a kid. Half of our meals then were of game he’d killed and began with a ritual warning: “Don’t bite a pellet.” My late mother’s father, a city man, a doctor, took me aside once at Thanksgiving after a dinner of ducks and pheasant and whispered, “Your father’s a savage. Don’t be like him.” Soon after, in my dreams of him, he shape-shifted into a growling bear. And a bear he’d remained, for decades, until the present, a fact I’d discussed through the years with several therapists, one of whom urged me to “confront the beast” when I reported it had chased me and then dragged my girlfriend into the woods.

“OK, it’s leaving. It’s trotting off,” I said. Nothing. He’d solved the problem with the remote and was scrolling through program titles on the TV screen. Still in my hand were the pills I’d meant to give him, though he seemed placid enough without them. I pocketed them for my own potential use and sat down in my chair at his left shoulder to watch his favorite mystery series.

“I like it because there’s no violence,” he said. “Any show with violence, it hurts me.”

Then he put out his scrawny left paw for me to hold.

FOR YEARS, THE FIRST HALF of my forties, we hardly spoke. Except during the winters when he retreated to Tucson to play tennis and harmlessly point his shotgun at bobwhite quail, we lived only twenty miles apart yet seemed to vanish from each other’s minds. Now and then on the streets of downtown Livingston, which was closer to my house than to his, I spotted him on a sidewalk from my car or noticed his car parked outside a restaurant, but only once or twice or maybe three times did circumstances compel us even to wave. I did call him on the phone a couple of times: once to inform him of my divorce from the mother of my two children, his only grandkids, and once—in a dream state produced by sleeping pills that failed to put me fully under—to tell him I loved him, that I badly missed him, that everything was my fault, mine alone, and blah, blah, blah and cry, cry, cry and then, toward the end, Who is this? and Where am I?, as suddenly, off to sleep I went, not in my bed, it turned out, but in the kitchen, where, hours later, I woke up on the floor next to a ravaged bag of chocolate pretzels, the phone receiver lying between my legs. We never discussed this sorry episode. My theory is he was drunk. Since leaving my mother twelve years earlier for a much younger woman who didn’t love him, he drank every night, which may have been my issue, because I had quit by then, scared of being like him.

And then one spring evening I drove out to his cabin, no reason, because not all dramas are dramatic, and found him in his garden by the deck, kneeling beside a shrub that he was planting, patting flat the soil around its roots. When I stepped out of the car, we simply resumed. He asked me to turn on a sprinkler. I turned it on. It sputtered and whirled and splattered both our clothes.

“Strong sprinkler,” I said once I’d stepped out of the way.

“It is.” He stood up as it sprayed him. He didn’t care. His hands were all black. He was holding a silver trowel. He’d gotten a little fat, even his ears. One cheek was puffed out round with chewing tobacco. He hooked out the wad with two fingers and flung it down and spat to get rid of the juice, then spat again.

MY MOTHER HAD DIED unconscious in a bed after an emergency surgery to remove an abscess in her brain, but I had never witnessed before a person’s day-by-day terminal decline. The process took exactly three weeks and was not what I’d expected, although I’m not sure what my expectations were, only that they differed from what transpired. The novel, surprising aspect of the experience was that his slippage occurred in leaps, in startling overnight transitions, though some of them happened during the daytime. I would leave his side to nap for forty minutes or to heat up and gobble down a frozen meal, and when I returned, he couldn’t flex the leg that he’d been restlessly bending and extending so as to relieve a muscle cramp. This leg would never move again, and then, hours later, the other would fail too. The progression was strictly linear. Lost capabilities did not return, not even for a moment, just down, down, down—but choppily, like a poorly edited movie.

His panoply of medications, which had multiplied after a second hospice visit, were interchangeable in their effects. Most of them, including the opiates, amounted to some type of downer, meant to soothe him. He had begun to howl, to bark, to shout, his fits sporadic and arrhythmic, the way the last kernels in a batch of popcorn pop. Since the pills were to be administered as needed, I supplied them irregularly, in bunches, placing them in his open mouth and following up with a carefully bent straw plunged in a glass of icy ginger ale. He could no longer hold his sippy cup. What he wouldn’t relinquish was the remote. He mostly used it to adjust the volume of Angela Lansbury’s chipper Yankee prattle as she reasoned through her clues. Neither of us solved a single case; our attention wandered in every episode. In his periods of clarity, my father would fixate on some matter such as the whereabouts of the notes he’d written following the death of JFK. He’d been in Washington, DC, that day, working as a law clerk in the same building that housed the Associated Press. He ran to its offices when he heard the news and observed great sheets of teletype paper unspooling from the machines onto the floor. Not scooping some of them up and saving them was one of his deepest regrets in life, he told me. This disclosure heartened me. It implied a remarkably clear conscience for a thrice-married man of eighty-two.

One night the remote slipped from his grasp. I put it back, closing his fingers around it. It fell again. Thinking quickly, I replaced it with a pencil, wedging it in his fisted-up left hand. He whimpered with gratitude, his pride restored. The pencil remained there almost till the end.

My daughter and son—Maisie, twenty-one, and Charlie, eighteen—came over to say goodbye to him one morning. Both were enrolled in colleges back east that had shut down early due to COVID. They sat in two folding chairs beside his bed, hiding their shock behind angelic smiles. I’d prepped my father for their visit with Ativan, morphine, and an oily cream, which I rubbed on his stomach under his wrinkled sheets, of cannabis extract. It lifted him, a proven stimulant, the only one of all his medicines that did.

“I don’t know if you two harbor any career plans, but frankly, at this stage, I rather hope you don’t.” His tone was more formal than familiar, a seeming relic of his legal practice. Also, because he couldn’t turn his head, he directed his words at the judge in front of him, not at the two-person jury to the side. “What I advise, and I advise it strongly, is that you put passion over pragmatism. Look inside, determine what really moves you. You’re not here to please, to make money, or perform. You’re here to grow, so nourish yourself accordingly. Water your garden. Always face the sun. Maisie, I know you’ve won prizes for your writing. Charlie, I know you love to ski. Stick with your pleasures. Pleasures don’t deceive. And don’t—or I’ll come after you, be warned—don’t grow up too fast.”

Maisie said, “We won’t, Grandpa,” and laughed. How she managed it, I had no idea, though maybe it was a laugh of pure astonishment at the absurdity of this shriveled figure bringing forth such round and cadenced phrasings. That his message was familiar, like a speech from a movie, heightened this effect. He was caught in life’s loneliest predicament, yet the wisdom from his lips was still shared wisdom.

Maisie had baked cookies for him. He gave up his coveted pencil and ventured to eat one. By then his diet was mostly liquid, those dreary canned nutrition shakes, and I feared he’d choke on solid food. My jaws moved in sympathy as he slowly chewed. Charlie had stopped smiling, I saw. His mind had fled to the far side of the galaxy, leaving behind his body to hold its spot. I wondered how I was doing, how I appeared. I’d largely lost interest in myself. A book I was writing was badly overdue; my sleep cycle had changed to match my father’s and no longer followed night and day; and my face, when I chanced to glimpse it in a mirror, seemed as dull and remote as a driver’s license photo.

The kids bent down and hugged him and said some things—what people say when there’s nothing left to say—and when they were gone, my father turned to me, asked with a nod for his pencil to be returned, and said: “How quickly can we get this over with?”

A WELL-MEANING NEIGHBOR sent a local priest, of which denomination I don’t know. He was young and shy and wore a mask. I gave him permission to take it off. I sent him into the sickroom and stepped away, near enough to hear their conversation but far away enough not to intrude. He asked my father if he believed in God. “Intermittently,” my father said, still in command of his rich vocabulary, the very last of his powers to desert him. “That’s enough,” the cleric said, and then he asked my father if he would pray with him. “Go ahead,” my father said. They prayed. It was one of those lilting, respectful, kindly prayers that seem unlikely to reach to heaven, that never quite gain the momentum to leave the earth. My father dismissed the fellow right afterward. “Appreciate it. Thank you. That’s enough.” He lay there for a few minutes and then said, “Walt?”

I went to his side. He was staring at the ceiling. The ceiling, and whatever lay beyond it, had become the main object of his attention. After taking morphine the night before—a dose the hospice nurse had doubled to address his mounting agitation—he’d gazed at its whiteness for over ninety minutes, moving his eyes as if watching a silent film. I’d asked him what was up there, and he’d said, “Charlie.” Minutes later, still staring, he’d asked me earnestly, “Is this some kind of ritual? Why are they moving all the chairs?” He’d squinted, zooming in and seeking detail, but whatever it was withdrew, eluding him.

“What do you want, Dad? Turn the volume up?” I ran my fingers through his thin white hair, touching the ridges and contours of his skull, convinced that I could almost feel his thoughts.

“I want my gun. My .38. Goddamn it, I want my pistol. This is bullshit!”

I inhaled. I counted. I exhaled. Yoga training.

“You promised to help me! You lied! I need my gun!”

His torso lurched up off the incline of the bed, met overwhelming resistance, and fell back. His eyes were fierce, his neck and earlobes flushed. He struggled to raise his arms and dropped his pencil. He gritted his teeth and growled and stirred one leg, inching it toward the corner of the bed. If granted full strength, full control, he would have clobbered me, knocking me silly with a single swat. He’d actually done this once when I was younger. He’d found marijuana in my car.

His fury subsided. I only had to wait. Once, long ago, I would have had to flee, or, if I couldn’t flee, uselessly fight back, but now I could simply stand there and count down. It had taken a deadly disease to make us even, which is how I regarded the situation, strangely. In truth, we weren’t close to even. I’d won it all. Even this house and its land would soon be mine. My fields. My hills. My woods. And all the creatures living in those woods.

Three days later he died. I didn’t have to help him. He looked like a different person by that time, lean, essential, stripped of all his flaws. His face looked ancient but suddenly not old, the face of a tribal scout, a Spartan officer, a being of absolute discipline and purpose. The night before, he looked down from the ceiling and out the dark window where I’d seen the bear. “Let’s go,” he said lightly, firmly. “OK. Let’s go.”

It’s no wonder I couldn’t imagine that he’d be back.

I LEARNED FROM A NEIGHBOR two days later that my father had never locked his cabin. He’d rather a thief steal his things than break a window. I searched for his house key in every drawer and cabinet, under every rock around his deck, but never found it. This presented a problem. Everyone knew his place was empty now, and Amanda and I lived forty minutes away. A friend who was helping me clean out the garage, a warehouse for my father’s camping equipment, fishing gear, barbells, firearms, and power tools, suggested that I mount cameras around the place and connect them to Amanda’s phone, she being more tech savvy than I was. My friend had an extra pair of these devices that he could lend me until I hired a locksmith. We mounted one outside, to watch the driveway, and perched one on a shelf in the open-plan main room, which gave Amanda a view of half the house.

Back home at last, I set to work on my neglected book. It was a sort of philosophical travelogue about a long road trip I’d taken around America before the virus hit. It felt archaic now, the journal of a different person in another country, another time. It also brought back a painful memory. In Little Rock, Arkansas, weeks into my travels, my father had called from Tucson to invite me to a party for his eightieth birthday. I was in no condition to attend. I’d come down with pneumonia on the road, the result of exhaustion, fast food, and motel living. I was taking steroids and antibiotics, and I was huffing from an inhaler. I dramatized my condition on the phone, coughing, slurring a little, acting addled. My father, who’d lost the range of hearing specific to phone use, didn’t seem to notice. When he offered to fly me out, I explained my state to him. Disappointed silence. “It’s not for three days, so maybe you’ll improve,” he said. I agreed that I might, then coughed intensely and promised to keep him posted. And I did improve—some—but I kept this to myself. Old people. Cake and punch. Too far to go.

I quit trying to write and lay on the sofa. Grief, if it ever came, was still far off. It was something I’d get to after all the other stuff. Obtaining a death certificate. Having my father’s defunct hot tub hauled away. Putting the cabin’s utility accounts under my name. I’d started on this last chore when I saw my father’s cable bill, found it outrageously high, and called the company, convinced it had been exploiting him. It hadn’t. The extra charges were for premium sports channels and three others, especially costly, that broadcast porn.

Amanda ran into my office while I dozed, crouched by the sofa, and held her phone screen out, too close for me to read without my glasses. “It sent me an alert. You have to watch this.”

“What kind of alert?”

“The cameras detected motion. I turned on the feed. Just watch this. This is live.”

In the living room, on the rug near the big armchair, a husky young brown bear was grooming one of its forelegs with its tongue.

“There’s a bear in the house!” Amanda said.

“I see that.” I took the phone from her. The bear raised its head as if sensing another creature. Its ears perked up. It looked left, then right, then backward. It allayed its concern and started walking, moseying really, unhurried and quite at ease. It left the frame, proceeding toward the TV room, from which I’d removed the hospital bed the day before. I gave Amanda her phone back and told her to call Elwood, my friend who’d lent me the cameras. I grabbed my coat, my car keys. Amanda put the phone next to my head.

“Dude,” said Elwood, “a bear can trash a place. It’ll rip the door right off the fridge. It’ll tear up all the furniture, the beds.”

“What do we do?”

“We go out there. We bring guns. If we corner it, it might charge us. This is bad. You leave a door open? How did it get in? How long has it been there?”

Amanda, who’d leaned in to listen, said, “An hour. The first alert was an hour ago. I missed it.”

“Dude, I’m so sorry,” said Elwood. “You might be fucked. I’ll get my truck and pick you up. Ten minutes. You mind if my kids come in their car? They’ll want to see this.”

WE STAGED THE RAID from the driveway, armed with shotguns. Elwood, a former Big Ten football player who’d lived for a while in Alaska, crept ahead of me onto the deck. Amanda hung back by the truck with Elwood’s son, a curious twelve-year-old, and his oldest two daughters, one of whom had brought along her excited British boyfriend, a noted composer of electronic music with zero experience of rural predicaments. Having such a large audience for the showdown enhanced its unreality for me. I wondered if I was still snoozing on the sofa, or if my father would greet me at the door, which wasn’t standing open but latched tight.

We entered the house. I noticed its smell had changed, the sickroom odors detectable but faded and overlaid by a brisk new piney scent. We stuck close together, scanning our perimeter—a bear might hide anywhere, in the laundry room, underneath a sofa or a bed, even high up among the cedar beams in the lofty central room. We listened intently, our barrels level, our right forefingers on our trigger guards. What surprised me was the place’s tidiness; I’d expected destruction. On the long dining room table across from me stood a bag of pancake mix and an assortment of other groceries that I’d bought the day after the death but neglected to put away. There was even a jar of honey! All untouched. The bear had treated the house like his own home, and Elwood, too, looked puzzled by the matter. He waved me toward one of the bedrooms, then searched the other. Nothing. Had the security camera lied?

Elwood was the first to see the entry point: a window directly behind the chair at the head of the dining room table, my father’s old seat. The interior screen, mounted upright on a hinge, stood all the way open. The glass section behind it was swung out the other way. There were claw marks on the wooden sill, light-colored scratches in the aged gray wood. But the wonder was my father’s chair. It was tipped back on two legs against the sill, perfectly and improbably positioned to serve as a handy step stool for the agile phantom.

Elwood waved in the others so they could see the chair. Photos were taken with cell phones, proof for later. I sat down at the opposite end of the table, shotgun on lap, and ejected all three slugs. I was grateful I hadn’t had to use the gun and see my father suffer a second time.

HE HAD LEFT ME only vague instructions on how and where to spread his ashes, which the funeral home had returned in an oak box that sat atop a cabinet in his old living room all summer long and into the fall. He’d asked me to mix them with the cremated remains of his beloved bird dog, Greta, and scatter them in the meadow behind the cabin. I’d hoped to create a ceremony around this that his friends and neighbors could attend, but the emergency measures surrounding the virus forced me to keep postponing this gathering. Finally, in late October, while staying at the cabin to do some writing, I decided to ditch the plan for the memorial and lay him to rest that evening, by myself.

Dark clouds had gathered in the west, and snow was forecast for later that night. I carried the polished oak box and Greta’s box into the meadow’s tall dry grass and looked around for a fitting final resting place, a spot that wasn’t just random, that meant something. The meadow was broad and crossed by rocky ridges where gnarled junipers and cedars grew. My father had told me once that he’d discovered what he believed to be Native American burial sites on some of the ridges, marked by piles of stones. Superstition told me to avoid these areas, but the open spaces between them also seemed wrong to me. They offered a departed soul no shelter, and they all looked alike; I’d forget where I had put him. I shut my eyes and prayed for guidance.

When I opened my eyes, I saw it, the proper site: a pine tree, taller than all the rest, growing out of a mound or little rise about a quarter mile uphill from me. With a box under each arm, I trudged through the brush toward the conical green tree, growing surer of my decision with every step. I opened the boxes when I reached its trunk and scooped out a blended handful of lumpy white ashes, then let them trickle out between my fingers while walking in a circle around the tree. I repeated this procedure several times, striving with chef-like, conscientious care to blend the two portions of powder equally. The result was four concentric rings of ash atop a bed of fallen brown needles. I bowed my head and whispered a short tribute, then walked down the hill to the first spot in the meadow where a picture taken on my phone could frame the tree in its entirety. As I snapped the shot, big mothlike snowflakes drifted down onto my wrists and hands, melting and vanishing on contact.

The weather turned cold that week. Time to hibernate. The glamorous yellow aspens lost their leaves, and I mounted winter tires on my new truck, which I’d bought with the expectation of receiving a generous life insurance settlement. The money hadn’t arrived yet, still held up by the lack of a death certificate for my father. Our county coroner had questions about his passing; he felt that his swift decline was inconsistent with the usual slow progress of ALS. Tissue samples were sent out for analysis, but the laboratories that did such work were jammed up due to the virus, so I waited, slipping emotionally and mentally. The absence of a legal document attesting to a natural cause of death triggered feelings of guilt and paranoia. Had I mistakenly killed my father, perhaps through an unwitting overdose of morphine? Were the authorities and the insurance folks preparing a secret case against me? Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the flashy truck. Maybe I should be looking for a lawyer. “The best time to hire an attorney,” my father the attorney used to tell me, “is before you need their services. Because once you do, you’ll always pick the wrong one.”

When the coroner’s report at last arrived (cause of death: “complications from ALS”), I should have been relieved, but by then there seemed to be no exit from my disturbed, unsettled state. I’d been living inside the capsule of my troubles, emotionally quarantined, but as I reemerged into society, I found that most everyone else was hurting too. At a store near my house, I heard about a child who’d trashed his bedroom and destroyed his toys out of frustration over missing his school friends, from whom he’d been separated by the virus. One day in an alley, I happened upon a bar owner sobbing outside the back door of his closed business. The same afternoon I called a friend back east who’d sent me a sympathy card a few months earlier. His voice was distant and crackled like an onion skin; he said he’d been sick in bed for over three weeks and had lost thirty pounds. He lacked the strength to talk for long.

A few days later, while out shopping with Amanda, she turned to me in the car and said, “The photos. We have to pick up the photos. I forgot them.” She had to explain to me which photos she meant. Just after my father’s death, she told me, she’d found a couple of plastic disposable cameras, several years old by the looks of them, lying in a junk drawer in his kitchen. She’d dropped them off at a pharmacy for processing back at the beginning of the summer but feared that the film had been thrown away by now, the pictures forever lost. I didn’t care much. My father had left me hundreds of his snapshots, many of them from his European travels, others of sunsets, hunting dogs, and seascapes, but I was tired of the chore of sorting through them. I was tired of most everything by then.

But Amanda insisted we retrieve the prints, and soon they were on my lap, two envelopes. Every one of the first set was light damaged and spoiled, a cloud of yellow speckles on a dark background. The second set looked to be the same: bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. But then, near the bottom, I found one legible image.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What is it?”

I picked up my phone and scrolled through my photo library, arranged by dates. I went back three weeks, then four. My hands were shaking.

“Look,” I said. I held the picture I’d taken with my phone beside the one on my lap, from the old camera. They were nearly identical, shot from the same angle, the same vantage point. The only difference was that in my picture of the pine tree the boughs were bare of snow, which hadn’t yet fallen, but in my father’s shot of his future grave site the tree was frosted white.

The way it is now, as I write these words and gaze at it, out the same window where I saw the bear.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Walter Smith

Walter Kirn is the New York Times bestselling author of Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, a memoir of his friendship with the con artist and murderer, Clark Rockefeller. He has also written seven other books, two of which—Thumbsucker and Up in the Air—were made into major films. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, New York, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review. He has also been a columnist for Harper’s Magazine.