I rehash the day my dad had his stroke the same way I do most other days at home. Meat and potatoes for supper, light on the meat. The usual fear and tension he inspired in his wife, his three sons. So quiet we could all hear each other chewing. Then a few beers, maybe a shot of something??? Then mom getting busy with a clean-up project or a joint telephonic commiseration in the basement, Mike and Tom retreating to their room to do possibly mythological homework. And me dumb enough to stay in the living room while dad turned on PBS.

It was “our thing”—the primary bond between the A-student son and the father who might have been an A-student if it hadn’t been for circumstances B, C, D, E, and F. He plopped down on the couch with his head against its worn-out arm and scratched his balls. I stretched out prone on the floor with my chin resting on the heels of my hands, which is how I got my overbite. Watching TV and trying to think like him, to observe the world like him, though I wasn’t sure even then about the wisdom of that idea.

It was an anthropology show. Richard Leakey sat on a rock holding a proto-human skull—Zinjanthropus, I think, discovered by his mother Mary at Olduvai Gorge in 1959. He held the skull and talked about the tortured path of humanity to get from that massive jaw to our more delicate one, about the endless ways our ancestors should have died out but refused to do so.

My father lurched up off the couch, staggered to the bathroom, and started throwing up. It was Richard Leakey’s fault. Holding that damn skull in his hands so casually, taunting my hamstrung father and my nine-year-old self with the hopeless, malicious scent of life’s fragility.

Dad kept throwing up. Fifteen minutes later it took two cops and an ambulance guy to subdue his thrashing arms and get him onto the gurney. Half an hour after that he was in the hospital, by midnight they were sticking pins in the whites of his eyes to see if he’d respond, and three days later he was finally dead.

Maybe somebody pulled the plug, I don’t know. Richard Leakey with that Zinjanthropus skull balanced so insouciantly on his palm became my memento mori, my instrument of blame. I was old enough to know that the skull and my father’s death weren’t simple cause and effect, but young enough to believe that he’d started dying the second he saw it.

Why hadn’t I? Still too young to know. Still too scared to ask.