600 Hours of Edward

black hair and round wire-rim glasses, emerges with a grim look on his face. Beside me, my mother starts quaking.
    “Mrs. Stanton, gentlemen,” he says to us. “I am so sorry. We did everything we could, but we just could not revive him.”
    My mother wails. Jay L. Lamb clutches her tightly.
    “He appears to have suffered a massive heart attack. The lab work will tell us for sure. I am so sorry.”
    “He’s dead?” The voice is mine, and yet it seems to be coming from outside me.
    “Yes. I’m sorry.”
    My mother wails again, sobbing, “No, no, no, no.”
    The young doctor reaches out and clasps her hand.
    My mother sniffles and gurgles and turns her head from Jay L. Lamb’s chest to face the doctor. “I want to see him.”
    – • –
    My father’s body is in an empty room in the emergency department. Although I recognize him, it’s not really him. Gone is the brightness and color in his face and the way his expressiveness added to it. He is pale. His chest, stripped free of his ever-present golf shirt, shows the trauma of the attempts to save him—the compression from CPR, the use of the defibrillator paddles. His ordinarily well-kept graying hair is mussed and tangled andwet. In life, my father could be found where there was chatter and aroma and motion. Here, it smells of cleaning fluid, we’re standing still, and no one is saying a word.
    He is gone.
    My mother, sturdier now than she was just minutes ago, steps to the edge of the gurney and strokes my father’s face, then bends down and kisses his cheek.
    “Jay,” she says softly, “will you take care of everything?”
    “I will. Shall I give you a ride home?”
    “No,” I say. “I will take her home.”
    – • –
    My mother is mostly silent on the climb up the Rimrocks along Twenty-Seventh Street. As we hit the straightaway atop the rock, heading toward my parents’—my mother’s—house, she says, “I can’t believe it.”
    “I can’t, either.”
    “Edward, your father is gone.”
    “I know.”
    She looks out the window at the farmland speeding by. Up here, yesterday’s snow still lies sprinkled on the ground.
    “I don’t know what to do,” she says.
    – • –
    The house, which always seemed to me to be ridiculously large for just two people, seems cavernous without my father in it. I had my troubles with him—never more so than the last time I saw him, an occasion that now fills me with regret—but I lovedhis outsized personality and the way he could fill a room with his laugh and his voice.
    There are many empty spaces in this house now, and I do not know who can fill them. Not my mother. Certainly not me.
    “Would you like some breakfast?” my mother asks.
    “Mother, you don’t have to cook.”
    “I would like to.”
    I nod. “Breakfast would be good.”
    – • –
    My mother cooks and tells me what happened this morning. My father, figuring he could get in a few buckets of practice balls before the rain picked up again today, had left the house around 6:00 a.m. and headed down the hill to the Yegen Golf Club in the West End.
    He didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. He collapsed right beside his car. Someone called 911, the ambulance showed up, the golf pro called my mother, and she called Jay L. Lamb, who came to pick her up and take her to St. V’s. From there, she called me. In a two-hour window, my father went from eager golfer to dead.
    I am numb at the thought of this.
    My mother places a plate of over-easy eggs, bacon, and toast on the kitchen’s breakfast nook and waves me over. Her cooking is marvelous, as it has always been. I pick at the food. In fits and starts, my mother talks.
    “He loved us.”
    I nod.
    “He loved you especially.”
    This is not true, but now doesn’t seem like the time to say so. When my Grandpa Sid, who had been sick for many years, diedin 2003 and my Grandma Mabel followed just three weeks later, I remember that my father was given to extolling virtues that his parents never possessed. Dr. Buckley told me that it was part of his grieving process, a sort of “deification,” she said, to help him think of them in the best possible way. Dr. Buckley assured me that, as my father went through the process of grappling with the loss of his parents, he would come to acknowledge their attributes and their faults. “We all have both,” she said.
    She turned out to be right, too. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman.
    I will not interfere with my mother’s