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He’d been arguing with his wife, Jill, which was maybe why he was in such a lousy mood. She stayed in the kitchen and didn’t greet me.

He’d been thinking about the right-wing religious groups who were so into the Ten Commandments and wondered why they weren’t into the beatitudes.

I proposed that they were picking a fight and practicing being an angry mob. The reason the Democrats lost Florida in 2000 was that the Republicans had the better-drilled, better-armed, and more-prepared-to-fight mob. Most individual members of the mob, so eager to have plaques of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, couldn’t name more than three of them.

I liked, a little too much, that he thought I might be right. At the age of fifty-nine, hobbling across Manhattan on crutches for conditional approval from my father was okay with me.

His wife came into the living room and picked a fight about whether their adopted daughter, Lily, should be made to take her medicine. She appealed to my expertise as a pediatrician.

I asked what Lily, who was then already in her twenties, liked to do and whether or not she thought the medication might help her on her own terms. Jill said something else. Kurt said that if this discussion continued he would leave. Jill continued calling Kurt irresponsible. Kurt fled upstairs, holding his head and wearing the facial expression of someone in hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Jill complained about Kurt fleeing. Kurt came back downstairs and talked about how Bush should be impeached.

I counted it as a good visit and took a cab back to my family in Times Square.

There were a few more phone calls, but that was our last visit. He left me with the blessing of things to do for him, like being his medical proxy. It fell to me to be the one with him in his last days. I played music and told jokes I thought he’d like.

“If this doesn’t wake him up, he’s not waking up.”

He didn’t wake up. I was able to enforce some elements of decorum around his deathbed. His suffering was not dragged out. Without me acting as his proxy, no one wanted to be responsible for the death of an icon. He was not shipped to a futile neuro-rehab in New Jersey.

So I took care of my father like my father had cut through the crap and taken care of me thirty-six years earlier in British Columbia. I was glad to be able to repay the favor. He took responsibility for hospitalizing me, and I took responsibility for letting him go.

My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it be just the same old thing. It’s better to live in a world where you can write and paint and tell a few jokes than one where you can’t.

All the arts are ways to start a dialogue with yourself about what you’ve done, what you could have done differently, and whether or not you might try again. Whether or not you want to make a living or can make a living at it, people who consistently bother to try almost always get good or at least better.

Kurt was always trying to reach a little beyond what he was sure of. His refusal to find a groove and stay there when he was famous and successful was admirable, but it was also because he dreaded what life would be if he stopped being creative, honest, and willing to be awkward.

So one month short of my sixtieth birthday I became an orphan. I had lost my mother twenty years earlier. I was no longer on deck. There’s nothing quite as final as a dead father.

Right after the memorial service, my good friend Terry and I were in Times Square with our backs against a wall, watching the sea of humanity surge by. Terry asked why I was smiling.

“I’m just watching all these people who have made something out of nothing.”

A day at the beach