they had rushed to correct him. Sixty wasn’t old, they explained, it was middle-aged. And to die at sixty was to die young.
His father was forty-nine.
His father had wanted to live forever. That was why he ran every morning.
Cole wanted to know, though he knew no one could ever tell him, if somehow, at the moment you died, you understood what was happening to you. He tried to imagine then how his father might have felt, and he could not imagine this except as something extremely frightening and painful. He could not believe that, in his father’s last seconds, there had been any thought of rest or quiet or sleep or peace. What he imagined his father seeing and smelling and hearing was a saber-toothed tiger pouncing to tear him apart.
The year before, his father had had some kind of symptom, some stomach pain, and he’d gone to the doctor, who ordered some tests, one of which came back “iffy.” The doctor had ordered more tests, and it was while they were waiting for the results that Cole had seen what a hard time his father was having. Though his father had gone about his business as usual, it was clear in everything he did, including repeating the same joke—at which his mother always laughed dutifully, though each time with a little more strain: “Who has time to die?” The day the doctor called with good news his father said he felt ten years younger. “And you look it, too!” said his mother, dabbing at tears of relief.
From time to time Cole had sat in on a class that his father was teaching. In fact, the last time he’d done this had been just three weeks ago. He had sat in on one of his father’s lectures. It was a happy memory. His father complained endlessly about teaching, but that day he was clearly enjoying himself, and Cole had been particularly impressed with how he held the attention of those fifty or so students, even getting a couple of good laughs out of them. Anyone would have thought he and Abe Lincoln were bros. Cole remembered how bitter his father had been about not getting tenure. “If it was up to the kids, it’d be a different story. Just read their evaluations.” The students loved him, his father insisted, and whenever he said this Cole would wonder how those students would feel if they knew what awful things Professor Vining said about them and how much he made fun of them, sometimes reading from their papers to his mother, the two of them roaring with laughter.
When the lecture was over, several students crowded around his father while Cole waited, staring at one girl with multicolored hair and glossy red-black lips and jeans so low-slung he could actually see some hair. She waited till the others were gone before approaching his father, and Cole had watched as she flirted with his father and his father flirted back.
And later, at the restaurant they’d gone to for lunch, his father had flirted with the waitress. Usually it bothered Cole when his father paid attention to young women, which he did any time Cole’s mother wasn’t around. But that day for some reason Cole hadn’t minded. His father was having a good day. He’d had a good run, taught a good class, and in the space of an hour two pretty young women had shown their attraction to him. Cole knew his father was proud of his fit body and his still-thick, mostly still-black hair, and how happy it made him when people thought he was much younger than he was. That day, he was wearing a turquoise shirt that made his blue eyes almost glow. People were always saying what beautiful eyes he had. The kind of eyes, his mother said, that flirt all by themselves.
There would be a time when the thought that he’d never see his father again would crush Cole with a weight he feared he could not survive. But what he felt mostly in those first hours of grief was overwhelming sadness for his father himself. He felt sorry for his father, who would never see or do anything in the world again—more sorry than he had ever felt for anybody in his life. He saw how terrible it must be to be afraid to die, to want to live and live, and to not have any power to change what was going to happen to you. He told