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11 The End of the World If there was such a thing as the good life after the good war, the end of it came early for my mother, my brother, my sister, and me on a night now more than fifty years ago. To be exact, at 9:05 p.m., Tuesday, March 5, 1957, in the space of a few minutes, my father died of a massive heart attack . He was forty-seven. My mother was forty-six, my brother twentyone , my sister ten. I was twelve.The physical particulars of the event were vouchsafed to my sister and me, sitting with our father in a small, cozy room, paneled all around with cabinets and bookshelves, that we used for reading and watching TV. It was what people today would call a family room. We called it the den. Holding up a model ship I was in the final stages of assembling, I turned around to face my father, who seemed to be making some sort of odd movement in his high-backed chair just across the room. My sister, on a small couch off to his side, must have noticed as well. For an instant it must have looked to both of us as if he was trying to offer us one of his myriad comedy turns,perhaps the J.Fred Muggs chimpanzee imitation he had recently perfected that my sister and I found unceasingly hilarious. But instead he seemed to be clutching at something up high in his chest, near the throat. He began to snort and convulse in ways, I suddenly realized, I had never seen a human being do—ways, in fact, a human being was not meant to do. He was dying. My sister and I began to cry out. In a matter of seconds he slumped in his chair. My sister kept calling for our mother. As I vaguely remembered being taught in some first-aid class somewhere—gym class, Boy Scouts, swimming les- The End of the World / 173 sons, I don’t remember which—I tried to pull forward my father’s shoulders and pump his chest. I held my sister. I somehow recall mumbling the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t remember, exactly, when or how my mother appeared at the small flight of stairs leading down into the room, but she did. She was already too late. The only detail I can summon back from just afterward is the voice of the doctor when he got there maybe fifteen minutes later. Part of a respected team of country GPs, old family friends and social visitors, he was normally—as distinguished from his jovial, somewhat earthy counterpart—a learned and clinical man, with a reserve many people took for coldness. But now he sounded as if his heart was breaking. “Marty, he’s gone,” he told my mom.Those were his exact words.“Marty, he’s gone.” As he spoke, I was standing with my mother, slightly to the side and behind, looking beyond them both down into the den, where my father remained in his chair. I could see his right hand on the armrest. Two things more come back to me from later. I remember my brother, handsome in his college tweeds, coming up the front walk, trying manfully to hold in his sadness, having driven several hours through the night. Oddly, I also have memories from throughout the long hours of darkness of an uncle by marriage—something of a disreputable character, a drinker, weekend musician, and ladies’ man—sitting up with me in the big bedroom I had to myself since my brother had gone to college. I had been sent there to try and sleep. Whenever I woke up, shaking and crying out, as I did every so often before daylight, I could make him out across the room, keeping watch over me, always in the same chair. My recollection is that he must not have left me for a minute. It seemed to be his gift of steadfastness to the family this night. “Coronary occlusion” was the common phrasing in those days for the thing that killed my father—a form of severe, usually fatal heart attack. I don’t think it’s used much anymore. I find it strange that it took me decades to find out what any kind of heart attack really was. I always thought it was some enormous clot that stopped up one of the body’s big...

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