The stairs down to where my father lay dying led from the sunlit kitchen of his parents’ house to the wood-paneled basement. Upstairs, family members were gathering for a breakfast of pigs’ brains, which I had never tasted but which my father recalled fondly from his childhood on the farm where my grandparents had raised their five children in the wheat fields of North Dakota.

Years later they moved to the house in Dickenson, the town where I and all my siblings save the eldest were born. It was here that children, grandchildren, cousins, and others were descending to celebrate my grandparents’ sixty-fifth wedding anniversary.

That morning my father arrived at the house sweaty and breathless from his jog over from the motel where he was staying with his wife and their child.

We had a polite relationship, my father and I, carefully constructed since my teenage years, when he refused me equal status with brothers. The two of them he sent to private high schools, but when I asked for the same privilege, he said he couldn’t afford it. Then, as graduation approached, he vigorously opposed my decision to enlist in the air force. The military was fine for his sons, but his plan for me, as for each of his daughters, was college, where I was meant to meet a man who would keep me in the manner to which I would wish to become accustomed.

Ten years after high school, following a tour in the military and then a bachelor’s degree and the start of a career, the man for me had yet to materialize. Meanwhile, my father had tied the knot with the mistress who had borne him a son while he was still married to my mother.

My father made one of his casually cruel comments about my status as a single woman when we were in the car with other relatives. This was the night before I went down the stairs at my grandparents’ house. I don’t recall the exact conversation, but he said something like, “You need to get married.”

“Why?” I shot back. “So I can be as unhappy as you?”

The gasp from the other relatives and the silence that followed was in response to the rudeness of my comment, not his.

He and I didn’t speak again.

When he arrived at the house that morning, I was curled with a book in the sitting room—all the other relatives already were engaged in conversations that didn’t seem to welcome me. I heard him greet his parents, then go down to the basement to see a recent renovation. I came to a convenient stopping place in the book and followed him, wanting to smooth over the hard feelings from the previous night.

A few years before, he and I had stood on the wide stairway of a restaurant where his second wife and in-laws and young son sat at a linen-covered table. It was Christmas, and he had invited me to stay with them at a Mexican resort, one of our intermittent attempts to build a better relationship. It failed just as had all the others through the years. I didn’t belong in that family group, a fact that became increasingly apparent as the dinner progressed. Eventually, I excused myself from the table.

I must have spent too long in the bathroom, trying to regain my emotional equilibrium, because as I returned, my father was coming up the stairs. Standing there, he told me there were different kinds of love. He didn’t explain what he meant, and I didn’t ask. He never talked with me about his feelings. If he had something to say that might elicit emotions, he did so in a public place, where it was less likely that he would have to deal with an outburst; when he told me about the existence of my half-brother, who was then already five years old, he took me out to lunch at a restaurant where he could be sure I wouldn’t make a scene.

There on the staircase in Mexico, I didn’t know what my father wanted from me. Perhaps he hoped I would welcome his wife and son as my siblings had done, but I resented the pain the divorce had caused my mother, and also the opportunities he gave his son that he never offered to me or my siblings—that very same Christmas he gave a computer to my half-brother, then in grade school; but not to my sister, who was in college majoring in computer science at a time when computers were too expensive for most students.

Different kinds of love? Yes, but my father never said he felt for me any category of that emotion, and by the time of my grandparents’ anniversary any love I’d felt for him had long since deteriorated, eroded by his disapproval of my reluctance to find a husband, my choice of a career, my more liberal political views.

This was where our relationship stood as I headed down the stairs to the basement of my grandparents’ house, to try once again for reconciliation.

From the last step I saw my father in his red jogging shorts collapsed on the floor beside the pool table.

I whirled and scrambled on hands and feet back up the narrow stairs.

“Help! Help!”

People converged from all over the house. My uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had once pulled me up a cliff when I got stuck, pumped my father’s chest and puffed into his mouth.

I snatched the phone. Someone was chatting on one of the extensions.

“Hang up the phone!”

A startled silence, a click. I pressed three buttons: 9-1-1. I must have spoken words, but I have no memory of what was said.

The ambulance arrived. The EMT from the passenger side clumped out with a cast on his foot. They fed my father oxygen. His stomach rose and fell like that of a sleeping infant, but there was no air of peace, only paramedics striving to revive their patient as distressed relatives looked on.

I gulped air, tears flowing. Sidelong glances told me I was a distraction, but I couldn’t stifle my sobs. The man who had given me life, who had put food on the table and a roof over my head for the first eighteen years of my existence, who once had told my uncle he was proud of me but had never said those words in my hearing, who flew me in his Cessna to orientation at the college that he scorned until they told him it was one of the two best journalism schools in the nation (a fact I had mentioned but which he either ignored or disbelieved)—that man was dead, and although I had long before accepted our estrangement, now hope of reconciliation was forever gone along with him.

Beside her fallen son stood my grandmother, silent, straight-backed, stricken. A policewoman, I think, said Grandma shouldn’t be there. I escorted her up the narrow stairs.

At the funeral, I alone of my siblings said no words. I couldn’t praise the man in the coffin, recall fond memories, or mourn the future without him. I stifled the urge to sing “Amazing Grace.” My father, an atheist, wouldn’t have approved, and in a final attempt to heal the rift between us, I acceded to his wishes.

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