My father, Arthur Dunleavy, died on a Saturday afternoon in October, peacefully asleep in his favorite brown armchair. He was eighty-six, a retired electrical lineman who had spent thirty-eight years climbing dangerous poles and somehow survived every storm. I was forty minutes away when my mother called. By the time I reached their house, the television was still murmuring about a baseball game, and Mom sat silently beside him, unable to cry.
My father had always planned everything. He kept financial ledgers, labeled every fuse, and recorded the dates on homemade preserves. In 2001, he even purchased his funeral arrangements in advance, paying for everything over eighteen months. He told me he wanted to make sure Mom would never have to worry about the cost when he was gone. I thought it was unnecessarily morbid. I had no idea how important that decision would become twenty-five years later.
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