He Greeted His Brother First

My father died of heart failure, slowly, with his mind intact — the nurses kept remarking on it. Crosswords until the final week. That's why what happened can't be filed under confusion.

His younger brother, my uncle Sandor, died unexpectedly two days before him, in another city. The family made the decision families make: Dad was days from the end himself, and nobody could see the kindness in telling him. We policed ourselves carefully in his room. Phones outside. Faces arranged.

On his last morning he was propped up, drowsy but present, and around ten he looked past me at the open doorway and his whole face reorganized — the expression you make at an airport arrivals gate. 'Well,' he said, dry as ever, 'they let YOU in first, Sandor? Standards have slipped.'

I kept my voice flat and asked who he was talking to. He gave me a look I knew from adolescence — don't be slow — and said his brother was at the door, 'come early to show me the way because I always got us lost.' That was real: their childhood hiking joke, Sandor the navigator, my father hopeless. Then he listened to nothing for a moment, laughed once, and said, 'He says his chest doesn't hurt anymore.'