I opened the front door and there was the dead man. He was next to the steps. He was climbing the steps when his heart crashed. He fell backward, hit the landing hard, struggled, and surrendered. My brother found him. Paramedics tried to bring life back by repeatedly shocking the chest, but that and other procedures could not make it reemerge from the depths into which it had sunk. The dead man on the floor was my father. A white cloth was over his face. His hands were partially open and totally still.

Life left him in 10 minutes.

My brother, who lived with my father, sat on the top of the steps and two police officers stood next to the body. Both officers were young and strong-looking. The younger of the two, or at least he appeared to be younger, explained to me that, though no foul play was suspected, they would not leave my father's house until the body was removed by a funeral home. It was the duty of the state to protect the body, to make sure nothing weird or unseemly happened to it. The body could no longer protect itself. It needed the presence of the state, the shield of strangers. The police served that function for the prone body.

For me, the officers were simply a rock for my profoundly shaken emotions to stand on. There is nothing worse than the death of someone you love. Indeed, your own death is horrible only because you are aware—before dying, before the nothingness—of the great sorrow your absence will bring to the ones who love you. When you see the dead body of a loved one, your mind is unhinged. The impossible is possible. The end is nothing but the end. In the face of this blunt fact, you either break down and weep or, as I did, find something hard to support you. Those young and broad-shouldered officers were not unfeeling, but they knew I needed their hardness and coolness to get through the most immediate part of this crisis—the dead body.

"Look, why don't you take the family to your house?" said the younger officer (my cousins had arrived and were now comforting my brother). "We will watch your father. We won't go anywhere until the funeral home comes. If anything happens, we will call you." I found no reason to oppose this suggestion, gathered my senses for the final departure, and, before walking out the door with the family—before walking past the carved and demonic pumpkin that glowed beside the door and the fake cobwebs strewn on the ivy that climbed to the window of my father's room, the upper room—I turned to his body on the floor, knelt beside it, and placed my living right hand onto the open dead right hand. It closed on me. For a strange moment, my hand felt the pressure of his reanimated and still-warm hand. This, of course, was a reflex, but it also had the ghost of a truth. If my father had been alive, his hand, under the control of his mind, would have done the very same thing—lovingly closed on my hand.