y father’s mortician was a careless barber. Stepping up to the open casket, I realized too much had been taken off the beard. The sides were trimmed tidy, the bottom cut flat across. It was a disconcerting sight, because in his last years, especially, my father had worn his beard wild, equal parts loony chemist and liquor store Santa. The mortician ought to have known this, I thought, because he knew the man in life. My father — himself the grandson of a funeral home director — would drop by Davey-Linklater in Kincardine, Ontario, now and then for a friendly chat. How’s business? Steady as she goes? Death was his favourite joke. And despite his sincere attachment to the funeral home game, he thought it was a racket. The grieving family paid a laughable sum to play it sober while attending to the musings of a rented pastor. But my father would say that in the end — chuckle — someone has to stage the reverence. Shop around if you think you can find a deal. As for the mortician’s aggressive approach to his beard, he would consider it a forgivable, if regrettable, overreaching. I looked down at him, in his plaid tie and navy blue blazer, his waxen hands sealed over a deflated beer gut, and imagined him opening his eyes to say with a wink, They don’t take scuzzballs.

My father’s brain surgeon is, appropriately, balding — genetically, he’s empathetic, going through life as though prepped for a lobotomy. He talks slowly enough to get it down on the pad in his lap; he wants us to take the conversation home for further reference. The glioma is in the right frontal lobe. (This explains why my father’s left side seized up. The receiving doctor at the Kincardine health clinic thought perhaps he’d had a mini-stroke, and yet he had the vital signs of an average, unfit sixty-five-year-old. They gave him a bed and booked a CT scan.) The surgeon says they won’t know whether the glioma is a glioblastoma multiforme, the most aggressive type of primary brain tumour, until after surgery.

“You need to poke it around on a plate,” my father says.

The surgeon pauses his scribbling only briefly. “Sort of.”

On the wall behind him, there’s a poster showing the brain from above and in cross-section. I wonder if the surgeon wonders if my father understands the gravity of the situation, if, in my father’s cerebral hemisphere, the tumour is smothering the comprehension zone while at the same time opening up breathing room in the sarcasm and bravado zones. Toward the end of the meeting, the doctor assures my father that should he opt for surgery, a team of competent people will be assembled.

“You won’t stumble in alone with a saw,” my father says.

The surgeon doesn’t look up. “Not at all,” he says, lifting an index finger to halt the slide of his glasses down his nose.

I first got the news a week into January, via an email from my oldest brother, who was a professor, as my father had been, and like him knew the importance of being graceful if you were going to be oblique: A health issue has come into view. My father had already been at the local clinic for a few days. The scan showed an obvious growth, and he was headed to London, where an MRI would offer more comprehensive pictures. Our stepmother filled us in on some of my father’s recent odd behaviour: he’d microwaved leftovers until the container melted, and on their way to Zehrs he’d waited so long at a four-way stop that the motorist behind them started honking. She didn’t think my father was daydreaming at the wheel; he was being hypervigilant. Either way, it was uncharacteristic. She became more watchful. At their New Year’s Eve dinner, my father’s lips got heavy and he said something unintelligible; this time, she insisted they get him to a doctor.

My brother had included the number for the clinic in his message. I called my father’s room. It rang thirteen times, then fourteen and fifteen, and I wondered if the ring-a-ling had somehow set off an aneurysm. Eventually he picked up. (I would later picture him floundering toward the phone with his two lifeless limbs.) I asked if he was okay.

“I’m fine,” he said. “What are you up to?”

We’re driving to London for a follow-up with the surgeon. Snow squalls are throttling Kincardine and every other town on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. I was chosen to drive, and the world beyond the steering wheel is like parchment unfurling from an infinite scroll. Nothing helpful is written there. Now and then, I hear soft thumping, and I assume we’ve drifted onto the shoulder. White knuckled, I steer us back. My eyes hurt from straining to see markers. It’s irksome that an overcast day can be so bright. The sun is always at hand, even when it’s doing nothing useful with its light or heat. Above us to the south, I see a slice of blue sky, and I try not to feel relieved: it’s a mirage, a fake slaking of the winter driver’s desire for safe passage. And sure enough, greyness has soon paved it over. My stepmother is in the back seat, gazing out through sunglasses. My father is next to me. Four weeks post-op, the horseshoe incision on his scalp seems to be healing nicely.

“I guess I missed my lunch pill,” he says.

There is no lunch pill. I ask if he’s hungry.

“I can’t imagine you’re prepared to stop,” he says.

“Not really.”

“I don’t know where you would stop.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“In which case I’m not sure what you’re offering.”

I don’t think of it as grumpiness on his part: he’s just being plain spoken and philosophical in his everyday way. He’s hungry, as all of us are hungry, and for the moment he’s trapped, as all of us are trapped.

Driving on, I imagine the beige Malibu suddenly bottom up in a ditch, my stepmother incoherent, my father dead, not from the tumour but by some other, less pedestrian method — gored, say, by a rural mailbox. North of Goderich, in a slight easing of the blizzard, we approach a band of flashing lights: a police checkpoint. Rolling down the window, I’m told the highway behind us has been closed for an hour. We’ve been alone in our tunnel of fear. The officer says conditions are less treacherous inland, where we’re headed; the worst part of the journey is over. I might have preferred to know beforehand that we were untouchable.

Skip ahead six months to mid-August, when my father has about a month to live. Arrangements have been made for him to die at home; we got a hospital bed from the local Canadian Legion, which runs a lending program, and my siblings and I rotate through complementary shifts with the home care nurses to help my stepmother keep him comfortable. His shin bones are like steel bars, and his fingers seem to have lengthened. I do not think fragile when I watch my sister moisturize his limbs, though. Robotic, I think. Metamorphic. He’s becoming a mega-insect, native to some other fluke planet. I go into his room one afternoon when he’s alone and awake. I sit on the edge of the bed and tell him I’ll probably write about his decline. “I guess,” I say, “I’m asking for permission.”

Though it’s an imperfect science, we have determined (in the course of offering a beverage, say) that when he looks at you only briefly before looking away he means no. When he waits for you to look away, he means yes. On this occasion, he stares at me. “May,” he says. “May may m-maybe.” Okay, I think, he needs time to ponder the idea. Nervously, I begin providing context: it’s a curious thing, I say, this dying business. I mean, I don’t know. It’s one of those big topics. The biggest. Also, do we want to let all of that bathroom humour go to waste?