The night nurse came and woke me where I slept fitfully on top of the musty Peter Max coverlet in my sisters' old bedroom. The clock glowed 4:30 a.m. "Your daddy passed just now," she said, as I stumbled up the stairs into my parents' room where my mother was standing vigil over what had been my father. I now know the meaning of deathly quiet. It filled the room like nerve gas, obliterating my mother's sobs and the birds twittering outside at the encroaching dawn.

The machine-like gurgle of the death rattle, impossible to escape in that big house for what seemed like days, had finally stopped. I didn't touch my father, didn't kiss him goodbye. He was long gone, his body curled in on itself, desiccated and yellowed with disease. I wandered across the hallway into my childhood bedroom and sank to my knees under a new burden of relief and rage.

By the time the funeral-home people carted my father out, zipped inside a green vinyl bag, my mother and I were huddled in our floral nighties in the living room listening to Mozart's Requiem. She averted her eyes, but I had to watch as they heaved him past his beloved wooden sculptures of Don Quixote and Sancho, down the stairs beneath the hotly colored Huichol yarn paintings bought in Mexico forty summers before. Like some flickering newsreel I saw him prancing around in his tennis shorts and hilarious terrycloth headband; bearing his huge Oxford English Dictionary to the dinner table to pillory some lexically challenged soul; picking up invisible lint from the rug in his impossibly fastidious way. The thought of this house without him was truly more than I could grasp. Besides, there was so much to do. Jews need to be buried right away; there were arrangements to be made, a million people to call. And the man I loved was arriving on a plane from New York that afternoon and would need a ride.

When my father's cancer spread from his stomach to his liver, he declined further treatment and decided to die at home. Somehow, my parents had neglected to tell me this. (When I found out, years later, it reminded me of the time I came home from college and discovered the family cat missing. I got out of the car and called to her in the garage, expecting her to come bounding out as usual. After I noticed my parents furtively whispering to each other in the doorway, they confessed that they had simply forgotten to tell me she had been put to sleep several months before.) Flying back to Santa Cruz, I was on a mission to heal my dad. I was prepared to smooth the sheets and stroke his brow and cook the soup and make him well.

The house had been familiar, unchanged, but as I stood in the empty dining room beneath the canted ceiling, the iridescent throat of a hummingbird suspended above the bottlebrush just outside the window suddenly caught my eye, glinting in the silver sunlight, and I remembered that my father was languishing in the back bedroom. For years, my mother had quietly battled the debilitating effects of a benign tumor on her cervical spine, and now the strength and agility of her arms and legs were rapidly deteriorating. She hadn't asked me to abandon my life, to quit my job, to leave my roommates stranded and my lover's bed empty. But it made sense to me that I, the youngest and least encumbered, should be the one to return to our parents' home. I knew she needed me.