Father

The narrator's father finds out he is dying at the relatively young age of sixty-four. This story of his last days is narrated by the younger of his two daughters. He is the son of a butcher whose family fell on hard times, possibly because of his father's alcoholism. He is the youngest of five, having two sisters and two brothers. As a child, he felt that his partner was missing because of a stillborn baby boy born the year before he was. He also worried that he would die because he was somehow linked to the dead baby.

Despite a sad beginning to his life, he overcame pneumonia at the age of two and continued to be courageous into adulthood: saving his cat, taking care of his father, venturing into water and onto an airplane for his daughter, and finally, facing death without flinching. He never let...