David Sedaris has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995. “It’s like an airline terminal,” he observed.Under different circumstances, I might have described the place as cheerful.

“David,” he said, as if he’d just realized who I was. Sister of famous writer David Sedaris commits suicide. It was this new state he occasionally drifted into: neither here nor there. Even his job remains a mystery to me. And how is it that none of his children, least of all me, inherited it?Of all us kids, Paul was the only one to fight the do-not-resuscitate order. .
“Better to give it another month,” he said, adding that I shouldn’t worry too much. Even his water was mixed with a thickener that gave it the consistency of nectar.“He has a bone that protrudes from the back of his neck and causes food to go down the wrong way,” Lisa explained.

you won.”A moment later he asked for more water, and drifted mid-sip into that neither-here-nor-there state. like you were a year ago, but drunk.”“That’s a very astute . There were polo shirts and dress shirts and casual shirts from every decade of postwar America. He looked twenty years older than he had on my last visit to Raleigh, six months earlier. It would be like a scene in a movie, the wealthy man’s children crowded into the lawyer’s office: “And, to my son David, I leave nothing.”When I confronted him about the will, he said he’d consider leaving me a modest sum, but only if I promised that Hugh would touch none of the money.“Actually, don’t worry,” I said, of the plane tickets. . . There were sweaters in every shade: the cardigans on hangers, their sleeves folded in a self-embrace to prevent them from stretching; the V-necks and turtlenecks folded in stacks, a few unprotected, but mostly moth-proofed in plastic bags. “It’s what you’ve been calling your neighbors here, the ones parked in the hall who can’t walk or feed themselves. ♦His systems were failing.

“There’s your sphincter!”I’ve always figured there was a reason my insides were on the inside: so I wouldn’t have to look at them. Then I claimed the camel-colored, moth-eaten beret I’d bought him on a school trip to Madrid in 1975.“It matches your skin and makes you look bald,” Amy said.We were all in the dining room, going through boxes with more boxes in them, when I glanced over at the window and saw a doe step out of the woods and approach some of the trash on the lawn near the carport, head lowered, as if she’d followed the scent of fifty-year-old house paint hardened in rusted-through cans. Perhaps our dogs had scared them off.“Oh,” Lisa said, her voice as soft as our father’s. “Did I tell you I just repainted my basement?” He found a picture on his phone and showed me what looked like a Scandinavian preschool, each wall a bold primary color.“Let me see,” Amy said. Effortless.


Our father was in his reclining chair covered with a blanket when we arrived, not asleep but not exactly awake, either.

Hats and coats and scarves and gloves. “Dad is my best friend.” He didn’t say it in a mawkish or dramatic way, but matter-of-factly, the way you might identify your car in a parking lot: “It’s that one there.” The relationship between my brother and my father has always been a mystery to my sisters and me. I was wearing the red shirt I’d taken from my father’s closet, and had grown increasingly self-conscious about how strongly it stank of mildew.While eating, we returned to the topic of his obituary, and what would follow. Plus the oxygen machine was loud.“Real.” He gestured to his worn-out body, and the bag on the floor half filled with his urine. The challenge was to understand what had sustained them for so long.“I know what you’ve come to expect from me is physical comedy, but tonight I thought we’d try something a little different.” . I was in Paris, waiting to undergo what promised to be a pretty disgusting medical procedure, when I got word that my father was dying.